AIDS Expert Backs Pope on Condoms

World | March 22, 2009, Sunday // 11:20
Bulgaria: AIDS Expert Backs Pope on Condoms

A leading AIDS expert from Harvard University has backed the comments made by the Pope Benedict XVI suggesting that the distribution of contraception actually spreads rather than prevents the disease.

"The Pope is correct... the best evidence we have supports the Pope's comments," Edward C Green, the director of the Aids Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, said in an interview for the National Review Online.

"There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the US-funded 'Demographic Health Surveys', between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates.

"This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction 'technology' such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by 'compensating' or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology."

During his flight to Cameroon earlier this week, the Pope made a shocking statement on fighting AIDS in Africa and on the use of contraception.

"I would say that this problem of AIDS cannot be overcome with advertising slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem," the pope said, stirring big controversy around the world.

More than 22 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV, according to a 2008 UNAIDS/WHO report. Nine out of 10 children with HIV in the world live in the region, which has 11,4 million orphans because of AIDS, the report said, and 1,5 million people there died of the disease in 2007.

 

 

 

 

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Tags: AIDS, HIV, Pope

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