By the time she hit college, the first report of HIV prevalence among college students came out. Though the numbers were small, suddenly everyone knew that the virus was among them -- gay and straight students alike.
"Then it was, AIDS, AIDS, AIDS. Use condoms," she says. "It was like college campuses were this incubator for sexually transmitted diseases."
Today, students hear about AIDS in school, but education can be more down to earth when informed teens talk openly to their classmates.
"In school, you only learn the basics, and they focus on abstinence," says Graciela Ortiz, 17, a recent graduate of Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles.
She spent her senior year giving information to fellow students as a certified family health planner, trained by Planned Parenthood. "They'll tell you that condoms are more than 90% effective if used correctly, but they don't tell you how to use them correctly."
Ortiz believes information can change behavior. And Andrew Francis, a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Chicago, set out to prove that with an economic model.
Francis put a dollar figure to the risk equation in arguing that the economics of AIDS translates into changing who has sex with whom. He assumes a value to a human life of $2 million. The way HIV is transmitted makes it 3,500 times more likely that a man on the receiving end of anal sex will contract the virus than if he had vaginal sex with a woman.
That translates into this economic bottom line: The cost for a man of having unprotected sex once with a man is $1,924, whereas the cost of having unprotected sex once with a woman who is not menstruating at the time is 55 cents.
Using an economic model, he found that sex, like any other commodity, has trade-offs of risk and benefit, and as the cost increases -- serious illness or death -- people will engage in less-costly behaviors. So bisexual men, who claim an attraction to both sexes, will more often choose women as partners, he says.
Indeed, the percentage of men who said they had a male partner in the last year fell through the late 1980s and early 1990s, then rose again after drug therapy to successfully treat AIDS as a chronic disease became available in 1996, according to the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center.
The cost of risky sex is high enough to become part of an equation once ruled by less deadly considerations such as pregnancy, shame and treatable sexually transmitted diseases.
