Fullerton : AIDS Threat Taken in Stride in CSUF Study

Students at Cal State Fullerton know the dangers of AIDS, but they aren’t afraid of getting the deadly disease and haven’t changed their life styles because of it.

Those findings were released Thursday by Anthony Fellow, a journalism instructor at the 25,000-student university who surveyed 615 students on the subject of AIDS.

Some of the results startled researchers.

Sixty-seven percent of the students who responded to the 54-question telephone survey said they didn’t worry about becoming infected with AIDS, and the same number said they don’t think their life styles make them vulnerable to the disease, Fellow said.

Though 92% called AIDS “scary,” about 70% said they had no difficulty with attending class with someone they knew or suspected had AIDS. About half said they would do classwork or eat dinner with an AIDS sufferer.

“We thought that students in Orange County would be very conservative, to the point of demanding mandatory AIDS testing for faculty and staff,” Fellow said. “But we were excited that students seem so tolerant.”