Study Shows People Are More Afraid of Sex Than Car Crashes

Compared to the 80s and 90s – a time when most of us were too young to know what sex was in the first place – we’ve heard very little about the dangers of HIV/AIDS in recent years.

That’s why Charlie Sheen’s announcement today that he is infected with the HIV virus comes as a dose of reality, despite his admittedly reckless lifestyle that likely played a role.

While we were once bombarded with commercials, print ads, and large-scale events designed to heighten the awareness surrounding the disease – which was once seen as a death sentence – somewhere in the past decade or so, it began to slow.

But that doesn’t mean it’s still not an issue.

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As it turns out, people are still terrified of the possibility of contracting the illness (and perhaps more so for the moment after Sheen’s revelation). In fact, they’re more scared of the chance of contracting HIV than they are of dying in a car crash. A new study led by Terri D. Conley of the University of Michigan revealed that people thought that you are roughly 17 times more likely to die from HIV contracted from a single unprotected sexual encounter than you are to die from a car crash on a 300-mile trip.

Participants were asked to imagine that 1000 randomly selected people had unprotected sex yesterday. They were then asked how many they thought would eventually die from contracting HIV from that single sexual encounter. Next, they were asked to imagine another set of 1000 individuals who would drive 300 miles from Detroit to Chicago, and asked how many people they thought would die on the trip as a result of a car crash.

As it turns out, contracting HIV remains a very real possibility for the participants.

The average guess for the HIV case was a little over 71 people per thousand. On the other hand, the average guess for the car-crash scenario was much lower, at about 4 people per thousand. Pretty surprising, right?

While HIV is still a real threat, it turns out that these estimates are completely backward.

Statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, reveal that you’re actually 20 times more likely to die from the car trip than from HIV contracted during an act of unprotected sex.

According to researchers, the fear and the inaccurate estimates have to do with the stigma. And yes, as Sheen revealed today, there still is a massive stigma associated with the disease. When it comes down to it, risky sexual behaviour is judged harsher than other health risks.

According to Conley, this is the case even when you control for the relevant differences between the behaviours.

“It seems that as a culture we have decided that sex is something dangerous and to be feared,” Conley told The Atlantic in an interview. It goes all the way back to our childhood, as parents try to micro-manage their children’s sexuality with the danger of STIs.

In contrast, parents are typically more supportive and excited when it comes to their kids getting their driver’s licenses (it means they no longer have to play taxi driver, after all). As Conley points out, there are obvious risks associated with driving, but parents assume their kids must learn to manage those risks.

Conley thinks this approach should be applied to sex as well.

To test the idea further that sex-related risks are associated with more stigma than other types of risk, Conley and her colleagues ran a follow-up study, but this time, controlled for some of the differences between driving cars and having sex. They designed a test that would compare two cases where a health threat was transmitted through sex, but only one of which was an actual STI.

The researchers gave an assortment of 12 vignettes to a large number of participants, all of which told the same story: one person transmits a disease to another person during a sexual encounter without knowing they had something to transmit. That “something to transmit” was either the STI chlamydia (what the researchers refer to as a common disease with few serious health problems), or H1N1, or swine flu. Of course, the latter can have serious health implications – including death.

The severity of the disease outcome was manipulated between the different vignettes – from mild (sick enough to see a doctor) and moderate (involving an emergency room visit), to serious (hospitalization and near death), and fatal. The last two scenarios were not applied to chlamydia as it rarely gets so severe.

When the participants read their vignette, they were asked to share their thoughts on the person who transmitted the disease.

Once again, the stigma surfaced in a major way. Participants judged the person who unknowingly transmitted a mild case of chlamydia more harshly than one who transmitted the swine flu and the other died. It made no difference that both diseases were transmitted through sex.

According to Conley, this could come down to condoms. You can prevent STIs through condom use; swine flu, not so much. The latter is transmitted through the respiratory system. Meaning, participants rated people who must have neglected to use condoms poorly based on their “reckless” behaviour. Not to mention, they likely assumed that this behaviour led to the individual contracting the disease in the first place.

In the swine-flu case, such judgement doesn’t apply, and participants were therefore more sympathetic. Condom or not, the virus would transmit regardless.

That’s because even if safe-sex strategies were being employed, the virus would transmit exactly the same.

Based on the findings (and addressing that one limitation), the researchers concluded that the stigma surrounding STIs needs to be drastically reduced, or it could backfire. If the stigma prevents people from disclosing their STI status or seeking medical help, it could lead to higher rates of infection.

Their main finding: “Stigmatizing behaviors does not prevent unhealthy activities from occurring,” says Conley.

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