Two students from Yunlin County won the top prize in an HIV prevention poster design competition for high-school and vocational-school students, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday.
Organized by the CDC and the Taiwan Urbani Foundation, the competition called on students to design creative posters to raise HIV prevention awareness.
Eight posters were selected as winners among 275 entries.
First place was awarded to a design that uses the concept of net fishing in night markets titled “Don’t let your safe sex life have an escaped fish.”
It shows five people using nets to catch sperm-shaped fish in a stream flowing through their hips, and one red figure catching fish by hand.
The designers were Lan Ya-chu (藍亞筑) and Chang Ching of National Douliou Vocational High School of Home Economics and Commerce’s Department of Advertisement Design.
Lan said they wanted to emphasize that using condoms, as represented by the nets, could significantly reduce the risk of HIV infection, in contrast to the red figure who does not have a net.
More than 30,000 people live with HIV in Taiwan, more than 20,000 of whom are receiving treatment, CDC Director-General Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said.
CDC statistics show that about 2,000 people are diagnosed with HIV each year, he said, adding that 1,819 diagnoses have been made so far this year, about 20 percent fewer than last year.
People aged 15 to 34 accounted for about 67 percent of the new diagnoses this year, he added.
The vast majority of the new cases were caused by unsafe sex, so it is important that students learn how to protect themselves from a young age, Chou said.
The CDC hopes that the students’ designs could better convey HIV prevention messages to other young students, he said.
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