Friday, December 01, 2006

Happy Worldwide AIDS Awareness Day: AKA Condoms Solve Everything Day.

Will Condoms Really Stop AIDS in Africa?
The results shocked condom advocates. In the article, researchers Sanny Chen and Norman Hearst noted that, "In many sub-Saharan African countries, high HIV transmission rates have continued despite high rates of condom use." In fact, they continued, "No clear examples have emerged yet of a country that has turned back a generalized epidemic primarily by means of condom distribution."

I have heard failure rates for condoms as high as 30% and as low as 2%, depending on where you get your information. But let us do a little experiment and give condoms a 10% failure rate and a 90% success rate (no matter which way you look at it, condoms are not fool-proof). I'm not sure of the infection rate of HIV and AIDS so I will place it at 10% (looking at the cases in Africa, it seems to be higher.) Now start with a person who is unknowingly infected and uses a condom each time he has sex. If he is engaged in a lifestyle where he has sex once a week he will have sex roughly 108 times in the course of two years. His condom would have failed roughly 10 times. With the infection rate being 10% that means he has just spread AIDS or HIV to another person (10% of 10 is 1). If he keeps this up for 10 years then he has possibly spread 5 new AIDS/HIV cases.

In turn those 5 people continue the same lifestyle and over the course of the next 10 year have started 25 new AIDS/HIV cases. In other words, AIDS/HIV will continue to increase exponentially until those people who are infected with AIDS/HIV stop engaging in sexual intercourse.

I fail see how condoms are preventing anything other then self control.

I don't understand, the more people are passing out condoms the higher the AIDS rate (STD rate for that matter) seems to go. Perhaps another method is necessary. What needs to happen is a lifestyle change. Even if you were to lower the percentages of the failure rate and the infection rate, it still holds true that AIDS will spread through sex even if condoms are used, because condoms are not 100% effective in stopping the spread of STDs (You can check out the CDC research if you don't believe me). Certainly it might decrees the occurrence and speed the disease is spread, but it won't eradicate it as condom-advocated claim.

This does not factor in the new AIDS/HIV cases that occur from needle sharing and children born with the Infection.

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