Extra small condoms for 12 year-old boys go on sale in Switzerland

There are plenty of examples where abstinence succeeds spectacularly. Especially in Africa.
:roll2::roll2::roll2::roll2::roll2:
Next you'll tell me that teaching abstinence has had a major impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

HIV/AIDS rates in parts of Africa go as high at 30% of the population. Girls get married as young as age 7 and close to 60% are married prior to 18...and well on their way to their 3-5th child.

Abstinence is until marriage...and if paired up with BOTH being faithful and BOTH having been virgins AND having avoided other methods of getting AIDS/HIV upon marriage works well to avoid spreading.* (Note: Does not include rates because of rape)

The odds of all those coming together ... well, I suppose that the transmission/death statistics should go a long way towards showing how large THOSE odds are.
 
penicillin is one of the most effective weapons against AIDS in africa. it's often secondary sores and infections that yuck-up the genitals and allow the easier transmission of the virus during heterosexual contact.

often truckers are blamed for this, as they travel from town to town pigging the local whores with festering weeners.

perhaps some of the moralizers in this thread should go try to teach african truckers (or any truckers) to exercise good sense and abstinence HA HA HA HA. or perhaps we should just kill all the truckers, purging the gene pool, and replace them with chimpanzees wearing those cute little fez hats.

CHIMP_IN_FEZ.jpg
 
:roll2::roll2::roll2::roll2::roll2:
Next you'll tell me that teaching abstinence has had a major impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

HIV/AIDS rates in parts of Africa go as high at 30% of the population. Girls get married as young as age 7 and close to 60% are married prior to 18...and well on their way to their 3-5th child.

Abstinence is until marriage...and if paired up with BOTH being faithful and BOTH having been virgins AND having avoided other methods of getting AIDS/HIV upon marriage works well to avoid spreading.* (Note: Does not include rates because of rape)

The odds of all those coming together ... well, I suppose that the transmission/death statistics should go a long way towards showing how large THOSE odds are.

Abstinence is working in Africa - Testimony before US Senate

Abstinence Saves Lives

The Catholic Church is often pilloried, or worse, for opposing condoms.

The Catholic Church is often pilloried, or worse, for opposing condoms. We are told that the Church irrationally clings to abstract dogmas while real people lose their lives to AIDS.

It’s time to go on offense. The Church has a life-giving answer to the AIDS epidemic. Condom-promoters are the ones who are clinging to a ridiculous, discredited dogma at the cost of innocent lives.

Look at Africa. Nearly every country on the continent has vigorously promoted condoms to stem the tide of the AIDS epidemic there. And every one of them has failed to stop the epidemic — or even slow it down, much.

One African nation — Uganda — on the other hand, has experienced the greatest decline in HIV prevalence of any country in the world, reports the Heritage Foundation.

Studies show that from 1991 to 2001, HIV infection rates in Uganda declined from about 15% to 5%.

“The Ugandan model has the most to teach the rest of the world,” says Edward Green, a senior research scientist at Harvard and author of Rethinking AIDS Prevention. “This policy should guide the development of programs in Africa and the Caribbean.”

Jeff Spieler, chief of the research division in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) population office, states, “It just happens to be where the evidence is pointing.”

The Ugandan model was to emphasize that abstaining from sex outside of marriage was the only effective way for most people to reduce exposure to AIDS. Social scientist Joe Loconte says that there are four lessons that Uganda taught the world, if it’s willing to learn them:

1. High-risk sexual behaviors can be discouraged and replaced by healthier lifestyles.

2. Abstinence and marital fidelity appear to be the most important factors in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS.

3. Condoms do not play the primary role in reducing HIV/AIDS transmission. Uganda’s program did offer condoms as a last resort, mostly for high-risk groups. Abstinence was exclusively promoted for young people — and it worked.

4. Religious organizations are key in the fight against AIDS.

And yet the prevailing opinion of many cultural elites continues to be that condoms are the answer.

It should be obvious why they’re wrong.

Imagine that roller coaster operators decided to remove all of the safety bars from their rides. Instead, they decided simply to post a notice that said: “Practice safe roller-coastering! Bring a belt and strap yourself into your seat. Warning: If you fail to, you may get hurt, or even die!”

What would happen? Kids would die. Parents would be outraged. No one would expect every teen out to have a good time at an amusement park to have enough forethought and self-restraint to turn back at the roller coaster’s turnstile and go procure a safety belt. If governments responded by giving out roller coaster safety belts at schools, parents wouldn’t be satisfied.

And yet, when it comes to “safe sex,” too many people are happy with the sign-at-the turnstile approach.

Teens live in a world where sex is promoted on television, in movies and in music. Yet, a worldwide epidemic of venereal diseases mean that sexual activity can make people sick, or, in the case of AIDS, kill them.

It makes no sense simply to tell teens to remember to use a condom. Teens are rarely responsible enough to make their beds every morning. Why do we expect that, in the heat of passion, after we have given our tacit approval to premarital sex, they will use a condom?

The more effective method is to start telling people that sex isn’t healthy — physically, morally or emotionally — outside of marriage to start with.

That’s what Uganda did. The nation’s AIDS epidemic turned the corner when its culture began delivering the same message from middle-school classrooms to churches to community seminars and in radio, print and television broadcasts. That message: Save sex for marriage, where it belongs. It’s folly to expect to have sex safely any other way in this day and age.

“The effect was to create what researchers call a ‘social vaccine’ against HIV,” wrote Joe Loconte, “a set of cultural values that encouraged more responsible sexual attitudes and behaviors.”

As a result, Uganda’s Demographic and Health Survey of 2000-2001 found that 93% of Ugandans changed their sexual behaviors to avoid AIDS.

Catholics shouldn’t be afraid to insist that abstinence is the right answer to the epidemic of venereal diseases worldwide. Ours is the only answer that saves lives.

Source

African AIDS: the facts that demolish the myths

The mystery of why AIDS has been so devastating in Africa has been solved. And it’s not lack of condoms.

Benedict XVI’s recent comment on the African AIDS crisis -- "the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem" – provoked an international sensation all out of proportion to its half-sentence length.

"Impeach the Pope!" wrote a Catholic columnist in the Washington Post. This Pope is "a disaster", a Vatican official told the London Telegraph. These bouquets came from his friends. His foes were sulphurous. "Grievously wrong!" thundered the New York Times. "There is no evidence that condom use is aggravating the epidemic and considerable evidence that condoms, though no panacea, can be helpful in many circumstances."

No evidence, eh? None at all? Not even just a teensy-weensy bit? Had the Gray Lady and the thousands of other politicians and journalists who rained abuse on the Pope queried any AIDS experts about this? Apparently not. Had they done so, they would have discovered that many African AIDS strategists are having serious misgivings about an obsession with condoms.

In fact, a Harvard expert on AIDS prevention, Dr Edward C. Green, told MercatorNet bluntly: "the Pope is actually correct". Dr Green is no lightweight in the field of AIDS research. He is the author of five books and over 250 peer-reviewed articles -- and, he added, he is an agnostic, not a Catholic.

The not-enough-condoms explanation of the global HIV/AIDS epidemic is driven "not by evidence, but by ideology, stereotypes, and false assumptions," Dr Green wrote last year in the journal First Things. And myths kill: "they result in efforts that are at best ineffective and at worst harmful, while the AIDS epidemic continues to spread and exact a devastating toll in human lives".(1)

Experts with doubts

Dr Green is not a maverick voice. Similar views are being expressed in the world’s leading scientific journals. In an article in The Lancet, for instance, James Shelton, of the US Agency for International Development, stated flatly that one of the ten damaging myths about the fight against AIDS is that condoms are the answer. "Condoms alone have limited impact in generalised epidemics [as in Africa]," Shelton wrote.(2)

As long ago as 2004, an article in the journal Studies in Family Planning conceded that "no clear examples have emerged yet of a country that has turned back a generalized epidemic primarily by means of condom promotion". In fact, the prevalence of HIV/AIDS can actually rise with increased distribution of condoms. Take Cameroon, for instance, the country to which the Pope was flying when he made his notorious remarks. Between 1992 and 2001 condom sales there increased from 6 million to 15 million -- while HIV prevalence tripled, from 3 percent to 9 per cent.(3)

Benedict’s critics blithely assume that the solution is more condoms because AIDS in Soweto is like AIDS in San Francisco. It’s not. In the West, AIDS is confined to high-risk groups, like sex workers, homosexuals, and injecting drug users. Within these groups, studies do show that condoms are effective to some extent. But AIDS in Africa is a generalised, heterosexual epidemic which affects ordinary people.

For years, researchers have desperately sought to understand why AIDS there has been so devastating. Sub-Saharan Africa is most heavily affected region in the world. It accounts for 67 percent of all people living with HIV and for 72 percent of AIDS deaths in 2007.(4) But now the answer is crystal clear. The reason is the widespread practice of "multiple concurrent partnerships".

Multiple partnerships

What does this mean? In Africa, it is not uncommon for an individual to have more than one long-term partner at a time. In the West, we might use the terms "mistress" or "boyfriend". Relationships like these are more than just casual hook-ups; to some extent they are based on intimacy, trust and friendship. In these circumstances, it is very difficult to persuade men to use condoms consistently. Concurrency, as the scholars term it, is a deadly recipe.

This is the theme of a highly-praised 2007 book by the medical journalist Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS (warmly reviewed by the New York Times, by the way). For a long time she attributed the epidemic to commercial sex, poverty, discrimination against women and low condom use. But after observing that HIV rates were increasing despite higher condom use, she grasped that concurrency is the key to the problem. She describes these multiple long-term partnerships as the "super highway of infections" with casual sex operating as "on ramps".

"Condoms alone won’t stop the virus, because so much transmission is taking place in longer term relationships in which condoms are seldom used," she told an interviewer last year. "Therefore, a collective shift in sexual norms, especially partner reduction, is crucial."(5)

And it turns out that condoms can be worse than just ineffective in a generalised epidemic. Dr Green explained to MercatorNet that they "may even exacerbate HIV infection levels due to a phenomenon called risk compensation, or behavioral disinhibition. People take more sexual risks because they feel safer than is actually justified when using condoms."

Effective solutions

If showering condoms over Africa can’t stop the epidemic, what will? According to a recent article in Science by researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, the University of California at San Francisco, and the San Francisco Department of Public Health, only two interventions definitely work: male circumcision and reducing multiple partnerships.(6)

Male circumcision significantly reduces the risk of heterosexual HIV infection and has even been called a "surgical vaccine". It may explain why HIV rates in West Africa are relatively low. The UN is promoting it vigorously in southern Africa. But the challenge is huge – about 2.5 million circumcisions by the year 2010.

The other effective strategy, say these experts, is "partner reduction", which -- surprise! surprise! -- sounds remarkably like what the Pope recommends. In Uganda, HIV prevalence reduced dramatically after an intensive "zero grazing" campaign in the 1990s. A recent decline in Kenya’s HIV rate seems to be due to partner reduction and marital fidelity. Furthermore, despite scepticism by Westerners, it is possible to change sexual behaviour. A 2006 campaign in Swaziland about the danger of having a "secret lover" resulted in fewer partners.

If the standard HIV-prevention toolbox has "failed utterly to reduce HIV transmission", as Dr Green and other researchers contend in the current issue of Studies in Family Planning (7), how much is being spent on the treatment that works? Very little, complain the authors of the article in Science. The biggest chunk of the US$3.2 billion UNAIDS budget has been allocated to interventions which are "unsupported by rigorous evidence". Only 20 percent goes to generalised epidemics in Africa and elsewhere, even though these account for two-thirds of all HIV infections. Only 5 percent goes towards male circumcision -- and a negligible amount to changing sexual behaviour.

An editorial in the Seattle Times derided Pope Benedict for living in an "alternate universe".(8) But it isn’t the Pope who has take up residence there. It’s his critics. As Dr Green wrote last year, "Christian churches -- indeed, most faith communities -- have a comparative advantage in promoting the needed types of behavior change, since these behaviors conform to their moral, ethical, and scriptural teachings. What the churches are inclined to do anyway turns out to be what works best in AIDS prevention." (9)

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Source

And finally, many articles sourced from Africa telling condoms are ineffective.
 
And actually, if you think about it........PETA should get involved on that ape's behalf. Who gets busted??
 
http://www.avert.org/aids-uganda.htm
It has been suggested that the high number of AIDS-related deaths in the 1990s may have been largely responsible for the decline in the number of people living with AIDS in Uganda during this period.10 The reason so many people died in this decade is that there was no available treatment to delay the onset of AIDS, and high numbers of people infected with HIV in the 1980s were reaching the end of their survival period. In 2000 the Ugandan health ministry estimated that 800,000 people had died of an AIDS-related illness since the beginning of the epidemic.11
It is likely that the number of new HIV infections in Uganda peaked in the late 1980s, and then fell sharply until the mid 1990s. This is generally thought to have been the result of behaviour changes such as increased abstinence and monogamy, a rise in the average age of first sex, a reduction in the average number of sexual partners and more frequent use of condoms.12 Uganda's entire population was mobilised in the fight against HIV and everyone was made aware of the consequences that risky behaviour could have for their country. <Snip>
This frank and honest discussion of the causes of HIV infection seems to have been a very important factor behind the changes in people's behaviour. Music and educational tours by popular musician Philly Lutaaya (who was the first prominent Ugandan to openly declare he was HIV positive) also spread understanding, compassion and respect for people living with HIV.

A large number of deaths, talking about HIV/AIDS instead of hiding behind myths and ABC (Abstinance beFaithful, Use Condoms).

It ain't simply Abstinence, no matter how you cut your numbers. It's ABC & Education.
 
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