Millions of people are dying from Aids because western governments
will not accept that condoms are ineffective in curbing the spread of
the disease, a forthcoming report by the Catholic Church claims.
Evidence
shows that rates of infection have risen most sharply in those
countries which have been flooded with condoms, says the report, because
they encourage promiscuity. But rates have fallen in the few places
that have encouraged monogamy and fidelity among married couples, it
says.
The report, The Catholic Church and the Global Aids Crisis,
cites research estimating that if, instead of condoms, fidelity and
abstinence were promoted across sub-Saharan Africa some six million new
infections would have been averted in less than a decade, with four
million fewer Aids orphans created. Such programmes might have saved 3.2
million lives in South Africa alone from 2000 to 2010, and prevented 80
per cent of HIV infections in the hardest hit areas of the continent,
the report says.
“The overwhelming body of epidemiological
evidence tells us that we have very little to show for all the
investments in risk reduction measures, despite assurances that they
were the indispensible solution to the problem,” said the author,
Matthew Hanley, an American public health expert who has worked on HIV
prevention programmes in Africa.
“Many would be surprised to learn that
condoms … have not delivered as promised in the fight against Aids. They
have, quite simply, not accounted for declines in HIV prevalence that
their advocates had expected. Though condoms have been the priority
intervention, and been promoted time and time again, they have a rather
poor track record in general – for Aids in Africa as well as a range of
other sexually transmitted infections in the West. Quite simply, each of
Africa’s declines in Aids rates are most attributable to … changes in
sexual behaviour – especially fidelity or what the public health
community sometimes calls ‘partner reduction’.”
Since HIV/Aids was
first identified in 1981 has infected an estimated 65 million people
and killed 25 million of them. About 33 million people are living with
the disease today.
Mr Hanley said that condom campaigns failed
because they were susceptible to the phenomenon of “risk compensation”
in which people who used them tended to be more promiscuous than those
who did not.
He says that because condoms have a failure rate,
even with “perfect” use some 12,000 infections are expected from every
million people.
But the infection rate is in reality much higher,
he claims in the report to be published next month by the London-based
Catholic Truth Society, because people frequently use condoms either
imperfectly or inconsistently.
Mr Hanley said that similar rates
of failure and infection also exist in high risk groups in countries
like Britain who are “knowledgeable about condoms and could not be more
motivated to use them”.
But western governments continue to
contribute to the spread of Aids because of their ideological commitment
to “absolute sexual freedom” and a “billion dollar industry” in
manufacturing and marketing condoms, he said.
“To suggest that people should limit their sexual behaviour is to cross the cultural Rubicon,” he said.
“Even
officials to whom the public health is entrusted dare not contradict
the prevailing ideological orthodoxy of modern western culture.”
The
report provides evidence to show that Uganda saw a 10 per cent drop in
the number of people with Aids between 1991 and 2001 after investing in
abstinence programmes.
The rates of infection began to climb again
when foreign donor agencies insisted on a family planning component in
aid packages.
Pope Benedict XVI was severely criticised after he
publicly doubted the efficacy of condoms to combat Aids during a visit
to Cameroon in 2009.
Among the few public figures to defend him,
however, was Professor Edward Green, an adviser to US President Barack
Obama and the director of the Aids Prevention Research Project at
Harvard University.
“The best evidence we have supports the Pope’s comments,” said Dr Green.
Last
year, the British government announced proposals to “hard-wire” family
planning services into its overseas development programmes.
Andrew
Mitchell, International Development Secretary, said that the Government
planned an “unprecedented focus” on family planning in the poorest
countries of the world.
A three-day conference on Aids held in
Rome was preceded by an article in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican
newspaper, last week, also claiming that condoms were ineffective in
combating the spread of the disease.
The conference focused largely on
how to change life-threatening behaviour patterns instead.