Promoting abstinence ineffective against AIDS

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There is no evidence that promoting abstinence or marital fidelity works against AIDS, as the Bush administration argues, a senior Brazilian health official told the United Nations on Wednesday.

“Based on international experiences, today there is no evidence whatsoever that moral recommendations, such as abstinence and fidelity, have any impact that might prevent infection and curb the epidemic,” said Dr. Paulo Texeira, senior coordinator of Sao Paulo’s AIDS program.

The Bush administration’s overseas AIDS programs for the most part follow the “ABC” approach, which stands for “Abstinence, Be faithful and use Condoms.”

But a recent study in Uganda said the abstinence part of that approach could not explain the drop in AIDS incidence there and the researchers suggested it was condom use.

“We are aware that the promotion of safer sex involves serious cultural, ethical, and religious matters, but we cannot allow them to become a barrier for prevention,” said Texeira, whose native Brazil has been among the world’s most successful developing nations in countering a threatened HIV/AIDS epidemic.

“Our governments and institutions should decisively cope with these difficulties if they expect to be successful in controlling the epidemic,” he said, addressing a meeting of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development.

So far, AIDS has been reported in fewer than 0.6 percent of Brazil’s 182 million people, he said, compared to a 7.5-percent prevalence rate in sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic is the most widespread.

Brazil’s campaign against AIDS combines widespread distribution of condoms to young people with an extensive preventive education program and free access by infected individuals to the cocktail of anti-AIDS drugs that keep the disease from progressing.

U.S. envoy Sichan Siv, addressing the same U.N. body on Monday, said Washington’s AIDS programs overseas focused on supporting individual governments’ own strategies.

“We base our effective prevention strategies on what works for the culture and circumstances of each place, with the individuals and groups we are targeting,” Siv said.

At the same meeting, the United States has, in closed negotiating sessions, proposed injecting anti-abortion language into draft resolutions on AIDS and development that the U.N. commission is to take up on Friday, diplomats said.

Proposed U.S. amendments would state that nothing in previous U.N. action plans on “population and development” and on combating AIDS “creates a right to abortion,” the diplomats said. Family planning activists said the language, also pushed by Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Egypt and Qatar, was intended to influence national decisions on family planning funding.

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