LGBTI community events: Sexually Transmitted Diseases

On 3th of November in Sarajevo Open Centre we had an opportunity to learn something more about sexually transmitted diseases, its prevention and opportunities for having a happy, fullfilling life of people with sexually transmitted infections.

Dejan Filipović, who is a peer educator, in an interesting and relaxed manner shared with us extremly important information for healthy and successful life of all persons.

The devastating impact of stigma is obvious towards persons with sexually transmitted diseases, especially those with HIV virus or AIDS. Through this workshop and discussion, we repeated the fact that risk groups do not exist, but only risk behaviors – and what they are.

Dejan presented the examples of symptoms of sexually transmitted infections, and all other ways of how sexually transmitted infections can be transmitted.

We put emphasis on the less mentioned infections, especially Hepatitis B and C – how to prevent it and how to treat it.

We also talked about prejudices in society and LGBTI community towards people who are HIV positive. One of the participants noticed that he heard for so many times that people who are ”declaratively friendly” are giving discriminatory comments about HIV positive persons. It seems that it is necessary to work more on combating this kind of prejudices and discriminatory practices. .

We hope that these kinds of workshops will be organized in other places too, in accordance to the needs for education and discussions on the topics that are related to the health.

Commemorating 01.12. – world AIDS day, we are publishing this text in the hope that the process of raising awareness on sexually transmitted diseases will be continued and that stigmatization will decrease.