With all the vitriole being spilled over Pope Benedict's condemnation of the condom whilst visiting AIDS' ridden Africa, it might be that the experts, and everyone else, have missed a chance to give the whole sex, condoms, safety, morality issue another think.
That is not to say that what the pope said was "right" in the most literal sense - not to speak of his appalling timing! - but that is it not possible that the condom has become such a Western symbol of "safety" that all those experts who have been trying to spread the safety message in Africa may be taking the wrong tack, and that is why billions of c's have not made any inroad into the HIV/AIDS problem...in fact, it just keeps getting worse?
I think that the director of Harvard University's HIV Prevention Research Project, who has supported Pope Benedict s recent controversial claim that condom distribution was exacerbating the problem of Aids in Africa, may have a point. He points out that his is not a Catholic view, nor is it about morality, but it is about what does and does not work. Dr Green has said studies had shown that there is not a single country in Africa where HIV prevalence has come down primarily because of condoms.
"We now see HIV going down in about eight or nine countries in Africa and in every case, we see a decrease in the proportion of men and women who report having more than one sex partner in the past year. So, when the pope said that the answer really lies in monogamy and marital faithfulness, that s exactly what we found empirically.
We have for a number of years now found the wrong kind of association between condom-availability and levels of condom use. You see the wrong kind of relationship with HIV prevalence.
Instead of seeing this associated with lower HIV infection rates, it s actually associated with higher HIV infection rates. Part of that is because the people using condoms are the people who are having risky sex.
Studies in Uganda had found that people for whom condoms had been made available were found to have a greater number of sex partners. So that cancels out the risk reduction that the technology of condoms ought to provide. That s the phenomenon known as risk compensation. "
This is a bit like the mid-60s when young people became much more blase' about using protection because they "knew" that new miracle drugs could cure venereal disease. Little did they realize what they were spreading, and how they were contributing to the ever-increasing number of hybrid STDs.
The message in Africa has had to be a simple one - use condoms, save yourselves. As that message spreads, those who are not monogomous figure they are "safe" or "safer" when they use condoms sometimes.
The programs that have worked in a big way in Africa have made protection available, have taught about it, BUT the big message was about sticking to one partner, remaining faithful, or as the early and successful Uganda program put it: "Zero Grazing" !
Dr Green ads that "Condoms work in certain types of situations and [with] certain sub-populations and condoms have had a positive national impact in certain concentrated epidemics, so yes, I don t agree with the pope across the board. " He simply feels that a one-size fits all approach does not work, and that the message needs to be much broader, and yes, to include that ever-shrinking i
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