Can Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein Prevent AIDS?

What do Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and AIDS all have in common? According to one new advertising campaign, launched in the lead up to World AIDS Day on December 1, it's the fact that all four are mass murderers. And each time someone engages in unsafe sex, it's like getting down and dirty in the bedroom with the likes of the Third Reich.

Provocative? Check. Certain to attract attention? Check. An edgy new way of looking at HIV/AIDS? Yup, that too.

But as the summer of "Let's compare everything to Hitler" ends, does this type of advertising take things a little too far?

The "AIDS is a Mass Murderer Campaign" points out that the world needs new, edgy ways of looking at AIDS in order to avoid complacency. They point out that more than 28 million people worldwide have died of AIDS, with another person dying every 15 seconds from the disease. Certainly tragic numbers, especially in the wake of reports that suggest apathy about HIV/AIDS is causing higher contraction rates among certain populations, like young adults and adolescents.

The ads are trying to nail home a message of prevention - that unsafe sex could be as risky as living in Nazi Germany, or Stalin's Russia, or Saddam's Iraq. But they might be serving a negative, unintended purpose as well: demonizing people with AIDS. That's what Shawn Syms with Canada's Xtra.ca argues.

"Did the campaigners not think twice about wrongly comparing human sexual behaviour to the Holocaust, and inappropriately demonizing people with HIV in the process?" Syms asks. "The insistence on seeing HIV transmission as villainy obscures the most stubborn fact about the epidemic -- far from being the realm of malevolent or sociopathic people, HIV is transmitted through behaviours that are otherwise completely natural and normal, such as penetrative intercourse -- or behaviours that may often be hard to control rather than 'intentional,' such as needle sharing in the context of addiction."

Syms has a point there. Catchy public relations slogans or graphic images may grab one's attention, but if the underlying message is people with AIDS are on par with Hitler, is it even worth running the campaign at all?

More education on AIDS is definitely needed. We need public relations campaigns that get people thinking about AIDS in new ways. And we certainly should be concerned with rising rates of HIV/AIDS in all parts of the globe, from the First World to the global South. As Syms from Xtra.ca says, instead of scare tactics, let's focus on what we really need: realistic and comprehensive sex education, and not abstinence-only b.s.; and access to medicines so that people who have HIV/AIDS get the treatment they need.

If only those things could get turned into a sexy public relations campaign, we might just be golden.