Uganda Takes Up Abstinence Campaign (threatens working anti-AIDS program)

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: Uganda Takes Up Abstinence Campaign
Activists say the nation's shift away from encouraging condom use threatens one of the world's most successful anti-AIDS programs.

By Edmund Sanders, Times Staff Writer


....AIDS activists are warning that the focus on abstinence, and a related backlash against condoms, is threatening Uganda's progress in combating AIDS. Prevalence rates here dropped from 18% in 1992 to 7% today in a country where 1 million have died from the disease and another 1 million are infected....

***

Uganda's AIDS prevention campaign, launched in the late 1980s and considered one of the world's most successful, has fractured over its much-touted A-B-C strategy, which focuses on abstinence, being faithful and condoms.

Complaining that the A-B message was getting short shrift, religious groups and some politicians, with support from churches and conservative groups in the United States, declared war on the C camp....(C)ritics have suggested that condoms cause cancer or have holes that allow the human immunodeficiency virus to permeate the devices. Some have even claimed that condoms were secretly infected with HIV by the U.S. to spread the disease in Africa.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who relied heavily on condom distribution in the past, shocked many by saying recently that condoms are "not the ultimate solution." His evangelical-leaning wife, Janet, who wants a national census to determine how many young people have had sex, suggested that condom promoters are racist because they believe "Africans cannot control their sexual drives."

Their contributions to the debate led to an avalanche of statements by other political leaders who declared condoms "un-African" and only suitable for sex workers, truck drivers and those already infected with HIV....


http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-fg-condoms31oct31,0,1257909.story?coll=la-tot-promo&track=morenews

[Village Idiot]

1. Holy CRAP!

"Some have even claimed that condoms were secretly infected with HIV by the U.S. to spread the disease in Africa."

I wouldn't put it past the USA, though...they have been known to do such things, however much they try to cover it up...

Nicaragua, Panama, Vietnam, Native Americans, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc...

[CatBoreal]

2. IT WAS WORKING YOU STUPID IDIOTS!!!

They cut the rate of infection by more than half and they want to go back on it???

Geez! What are they thinking!