AIDS Epidemic Ameliorating in Africa: ABC Approach Seems to be Working
The UN has an encouraging report out, and it appears that--dare we say it--people restraining their sexual impulses has had a major impact. From the story:
The HIV/Aids epidemic appears to be slowing, as evidence emerges of more cautious sexual behaviour and improved treatment in some of the worst-hit countries of the world, according to a new UN study.Hmmm: It looks like the often castigated ABC approach is working: A-Abstinence, B-Be Faithful, and if that isn't done, C-condomize.
Signs that work on preventing the spread of HIV is bearing fruit are flagged up today by UNAids' two-yearly report on the state of the epidemic. In Rwanda and Zimbabwe, it finds, fewer people appear to be getting infected, apparently as the dangers of careless sex become better understood.
In Zimbabwe, a drop in infection among pregnant women, from 26% in 2002 to 18% in 2006, is being linked to reports of fewer people having casual sexual partners and fewer men paying for sex.
Condom use also appears to be increasing and in seven badly affected countries--Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia--young people appear to be waiting longer before starting to have sex. In Cameroon, the percentage of under-15 year-olds having sex fell from 35% to 14%.
More needs to be done, the report says, and that would seem to me to require even greater educational efforts at urging sexual restraint since that is the only sure way to prevent almost all sexual transmission of HIV.
That isn't moralizing: It is good public health and plain old common sense. HIV is overwhelmingly a venereal disease (although it can certainly be contracted non sexually) and should always have been treated as such.
Why some are hostile to that message is beyond me.
Labels: AIDS. ABC Approach.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:31 PM
11 Comments
11 Comments:
*Faint smile*
Good morality is usally a very sensible idea, in the long run.
The opposition to the ABC message is that it is seen as an effort to limit sexual freedom. So says Rev. Sam L. Reutikara, co-chair of Uganda's National AIDS-Prevention Committee, in a Washington Post op-ed last month "Let My People Go, AIDS Profiteers." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/29/AR2008062901477.html
He also says "In the fight against AIDS, profiteering has trumped prevention. AIDS is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar industry."
I don't know who it is that is hostile to this approach. Any hostility I've seen is towards abstinence-only policies that effectively reduce birth control options, including the availability of condoms. People who want us to depend on abstinence as our primary form of birth control are dangerously in denial. Or they're really anxious to have grandchildren.
padraig: The ABC is the Bush Adm. approach. It has been bitterly criticized by some AIDS activists who actually claim that emphasizing abstinence would hinder the fight. Rep. Barbara Lee accused the Bush Adm. of "trying to put their moral values...on communities and countries."
On the other side, some have criticized the C aspect of the equation.
This link is one example. http://www.thebody.com/content/art7912.html
Padraig, what on earth does being eager to have grandchildren have to do with HIV transmission? The former is always a good thing; the latter is always a bad thing.
In the past decade, the federal government has spent more than $1 billion on programs that promote abstinence as the only healthy choice to make about sex before marriage. Yet, the Bush Administration's own long-term evaluation of the initiatives showed that these programs seem to accomplish essentially nothing. Students in the programs were no more likely to abstain from sex than their peers. And if they did lose their virginity, they tended to do so at the same average age and have the same number of sexual partners as other students did.
Source: http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/PDFs/impactabstinence.pdf
Abstinance as ONE method to stem the spread of STD's? Fine. But as the only way or the "best" way? The data categorically says that this is ineffective.
Okakura: Don't mix apples and oranges. I don't know about the abstinence stuff, but the ABC--strongly supported by the Bush Adm.--has a "C" element, e.g. condoms.
Frankly, Bush has done more to fight AIDS then anybody in history. But that is beside the point. The point is that ABC works, and it seems to me the most important element of that is the A and the B. Succeed there, and the C won't be needed as a hoped for fail safe.
Point taken; guilty of mixing apples and oranges in my previous post. Only pointing out the obvious (and I guess, unnecessary) point that the human sex drive for many remains impervious to moral restrictions and thus to 'hawk' abstinance and monongamy for their health benefits seems to be futile plea; a larger number of people simply choose to practice unsafe and/or non-monogamous sex regardless of the risk. If this is a given, why not dedicate more education and resources to this end instead of re-preaching a sermon that no one's listening to anyway?
Okakura, I wouldn't give up on human self-control just yet.
A word that I've always lived by is "Never trust a man with an erection". Men actually wearing condoms is the weak link of any approach that relies mostly on prophylactics. Encouraging men to be sexually irresponsible and then expecting them to be responsible enough to wear condoms is, to me, counter-intuitive.
I believe that the statistics speak for "ABC" programs working much better than just "C" programs.
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Thisliberal: The statistical analysis of Bush's abstinence-based school curriculum was pretty dismal. (see PDF link in my first post)
And I disagree with the argument that programs lacking a central theme of abstinence are therfore "encouraging" sexual irresponsibility. Rather, they are correctly acknowledging that it already exists and will likely continue, even in the face of substantial personal risk. Thus, if a certain level of sexual activity is a 'given,' then what is the most effective means to minimize its most harmful effects? That is their proper mission.
It is morally incumbant on government agencies to promote the most effective and proven methods of disease prevention; not to impose a values-driven method that focuses on changing basic human drives. I believe that Mr. Smith said something applicable in another thread -- that doctors should prescribe medicine, not preach their values. Ditto for public health policy-makers.
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