AIDS Dementia: A Good Reason to Stay HIV Negative!

Cass Mann is one of the world's longest-term HIV-positive diagnosed gay men, now in his third decade of living with HIV, and the founder of UK’s only gay men’s HIV/AIDS charity Positively Healthy, which provides HIV services including education, support, and peer counselling. Here he talks about the terrible effects of AIDS dementia. People who don't respond to HAART or ARV are at risk of AIDS dementia. You can't distinguish AIDS dementia from syphilitic dementia. If you've seen AIDS dementia, you'll never again have unsafe sex. We do a disservice to gay men by ads showing healthy, buff young men. People don't show images of lipodystrophy or AIDS dementia because they are afraid of offending people. But if fear is OK for ad campaigns about drunk driving, why not for HIV? If we were honest about the image of clinical AIDS, people's vanity might motivate them to avoid contracting HIV. For more information, visit http://www.posh-uk.org.uk/ and http://www.AIDSvideos.org/.