WATCH: 'Painting the Campus Red' For World AIDS Day

University of Cincinnati students representing the UC Student Wellness Center, the UC Women’s Center and the LGBTQ Center set up a red ribbon display on McMicken Commons to draw attention to World AIDS Day on Dec. 1. The “painting the campus red” effort included ribbons that adorned lampposts and railings, in addition to signs to educate the foot traffic around McMicken Commons about HIV/AIDS awareness and testing.

Red-ribbon symbols on the steps of UC’s Tangeman University Center led to more information about HIV/AIDS inside the TUC Atrium. Student peer health educators offered red ribbons to the UC community at an information table. The information table provided facts about HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections.

World AIDS Day 2011 follows the 30-year anniversary of when the first cases of HIV/AIDS were reported in a June, 1981 issue of the Center for Disease Control’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.”

This week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that an estimated 1.2 million people in the United States have HIV, but as many as 240,000 people don’t even know that they have the virus. Of the estimated 34 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide, the CDC reports that more than two-thirds of the cases are in developing countries.

World AIDS Day at UC was sponsored by the UC Student Wellness Center, the UC Women’s Center and the LGBTQ Center.

The World Health Organization established World AIDS Day in 1988 as an opportunity for the world’s governments, health agencies, faith and community organizations to come together and raise awareness about the global AIDS epidemic.