Liberal academic Edward Green: the Pope is right about Aids and condom

According to Harvard professor Edward Green, Benedict XVI tells the truth about fighting the plague of the millennium in Africa: fidelity and abstinence promotion are better weapons than preservatives.

During his latest visit to Africa pope Benedict XVI told the journalists: “Condom distribution is not the solution to Aids, on the contrary they worsen it”. An editorial comment of The Lancet retorted that the Pope's comment was “outrageous and wildly inaccurate”. Based on your experience about the issue, is the Pope right or wrong?

http://www.tempi.it/007320-liberal-academic-edward-green-pope-right-about-aids-and-condom?page=0

Harvard Aids expert supports Pope's stance on contraception

by Anne Thomas

A leading Aids expert from Harvard University has come out in support of comments made by the Pope Benedict XVI suggesting that the distribution of contraception actually spreads rather than prevents Aids.

Edward C Green, the director of the Aids Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, said that research into the spread of AIDS actually supports the position of the Catholic Church and the Pope.

http://www.christiantoday.com/article/harvard.aids.expert.supports.popes.stance.on.contraception/22827.htm

African AIDS: the facts that demolish the myths

Michael Cook

The mystery of why AIDS has been so devastating in Africa has been solved. And it’s not lack of condoms.

Benedict XVI’s recent comment on the African AIDS crisis -- "the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem" – provoked an international sensation all out of proportion to its half-sentence length.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/african_aids_the_facts_that_demolish_the_myths/?view

The Pope was right about AIDS in Africa

Who’s the real expert?
Jokin de Irala

Did any journalists ask an epidemiologist whether the Pope might be right about the ineffectiveness of condoms in fighting the African AIDS epidemic? We did.

Pope Benedict XVI ignited a firestorm of controversy earlier this week. On a flight to Cameroon where he later greeted rapturous crowds, he held a press conference. A French journalist asked him about the African AIDS epidemic. What he said was only half a sentence, but the repercussions in the Western media were explosive: “the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem.”

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/whos_the_expert/

Stem cells - a cure for AIDS?

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow - 1/30/2009

At the Stem Cell World Congress, research has been presented that could mean a cure for AIDS at some point in the future.

In Palm Springs, California, adult stem-cell research experts met to discuss how AIDS could be treated by using stem cells from the infected patient's own body. Details of the research come from Dr. David Stevens of the Christian Medical & Dental Associations.

Continue...

More on AIDS in Africa

This article in Zenit interviews Matthew Hanley, long-time technical expert on AIDS/HIV for the Catholic Relief Service. He is also author of a new book on AIDS in Africa, Avoiding Risk, Affirming Life: Science, Love, and AIDS. His conclusions have significant overlap with those of Helen Epstein, whose book I reviewed earlier. She argued that a reduction in the number of sexual partners, not an increase in the use of condoms, accounts for the most significant drops in new HIV infection rates. According to Matthew Hanley:

Actual changes in patterns of sexual behavior have led to the most significant reductions in HIV prevalence. Take the well-known case of Uganda, where the prevalence rate dropped from 15% in 1991 to a little over 5% in 2001. Behavior change was so thorough in Uganda that by the mid-1990s, 95% of adults in that country said they had only one partner or none at all. But it is not only Uganda.

The most important factor in recent HIV declines observed in several other countries, such as Kenya, Zimbabwe and Haiti has been an increase in fidelity or "partner reduction." This should not be altogether surprising, considering that in a large swath of southern Africa, where over half of new infections globally come from, the AIDS epidemic is being driven by the dynamics of multiple and often concurrent sexual partnerships.

In other words, changing behavior is more important than reducing the risk associated with a given set of behavior.
Hanley also talks about the uniquely Catholic aspects to his work. Not only is the Church trying to prevent disease, she is also trying to promote a healthy way of life, that integrates love and sexual activity within the context of married life.

We try to articulate what the Church actually proposes, abstinence and fidelity, in a positive manner. I have found in my trips to Africa that there is a real thirst for something different, something hopeful. We all know that people yearn for more than the satisfaction of their appetites. In other words, they yearn for love, for respect and for meaning in life. In his first encyclical, "Deus Caritas Est," Benedict XVI reminded us of long-standing Christian tradition, namely that human beings are a "union of body and soul," that love is characterized by exclusivity, or fidelity, and that love contains a quality of permanence over time.

When we conducted training recently with five dioceses in Ethiopia, one of the participants, a wife and a mother, spoke for the group by saying how much she appreciated the emphasis on fidelity and related human values such as respect and communication. She was puzzled as to why such basic themes are not more routinely promoted in the context of HIV prevention, adding: "Why hasn't anyone explained it like this before?"

So we try to address the whole human person, their deeper aspirations, and in proposing love, affirm basic Christian sexual ethics. It is on this level that the Church then encounters the wider culture, which as Pope John Paul II suggested in "Familiaris Consortio," often holds "fundamentally irreconcilable views of the human person and of human sexuality," leading many to aggressively reject these first principles.

Money quote from Matthew Hanley:

Perhaps one of the most helpful means that I have seen of expressing the moral significance of the issues involved comes from the Kenyan bishops. In their pastoral letter on AIDS, they hit upon the crux of the matter: The Church proposes the same sexual morality even "when and where AIDS poses no danger." The central issue with respect to the Church's consistent teaching on sexual matters is thus not the risk of HIV, but the lack of chastity, and "this is not easy for 'the world' to grasp.

What a concept.
I look forward to seeing his book.

Fighting Aids with African Common Sense

My article reviewing Helen Epstein's book has been posted on the Acton site. It is also up on my own website.
The occasion for my writing about this book was the UN admission that they had been inflating the numbers of new HIV infections for years. This chart gives an idea of how great the overstatement has been:

AIDS REVISION BY THE NUMBERS
U.N. scientists have overestimated the size of the epidemic:

33 million: Revised estimate for HIV cases worldwide

40 million: Previous worldwide estimate

2.5 million: Number of annual new HIV infections

40 percent: The drop from last year's HIV infection estimate

SOURCE: United Nations documents

Helen Epstein was one of the experts cited:

Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” "I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way,” Epstein said.

Here are the opening paragraphs of my review of her book. I absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in sexual politics.

Amid reports that the United Nations has been grossly overestimating the scope of the global AIDS pandemic, a new book points to what may be an even greater miscalculation: AIDS relief efforts have failed to understand the crucial role of family and community networks in controlling the disease.

International aid agencies assumed that reducing the spread of AIDS was primarily a matter of hygiene and health care. UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, estimates that total spending on AIDS programs will increase 12 percent this year to $10 billion. Yet, relief organizations have overlooked actual social behavior and sexual practices.

This is the message of Helen Epstein’s important new book, The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight Against Aids. Her book is one long testimony to the necessity of at least some social structures operating on a human scale. Although Epstein doesn’t cite the principle of subsidiarity from Catholic social teaching, or the corresponding principle of sphere sovereignty from the Dutch Reformed tradition, the importance of intensely local communities as “first responders” is clearly highlighted. Her book shows that the few noteworthy successes in slowing the spread of AIDS and comforting the sick have not come from sophisticated international organizations, but from local communities.

Fighting AIDS with African Common Sense

That's the title the Acton Institute gave to my review of Helen Epstein's fine new book: The Invisible Cure: Africa, The West and the Fight Against AIDS
This book is good and interesting on multiple levels. The most striking thing about the book is that it makes it clear that the international aid organizations charged with fighting AIDS had their own agendas, particularly a view of human sexuality. I hope to write another review, highlighting that aspect of the book. The review over at the Acton site focuses on the good sense of the local people in comparison with the distant and out of touch approach of the international agencies. This is a fine example of the Catholic Social Teaching principle of Subsidiarity. Although Epstein is probably not aware of it and never mentions it, I think she would agree that social functions need to be performed by the lowest level of society that is capable of doing the job. The lower levels of organization have knowledge and information that are not avaialable to the higher levels. And the lower levels can interatct with individuals in a more humane way. This book is worth reading in any case.

HIV: the Invisible Cure

A new book by Helen Epstein uncovers the Invisible Cure for HIV: behavioral changes. She documents the impressive decline in HIV in Uganda during the 1990's. She discovered the seminal paper by Maxine Ankrah that showed that reductions in the numbers of sexual partners were crucial in containing the spread of the disease. This paper was downplayed or overlooked completely in UN reports. This book sounds like an important breakthrough in the discussion about AIDS prevention, when even the NYT is willing to read it objectively.
While I'm glad that she has done this, I must say that I remember reading about the success of the Ugandan program well before this. The Weekly Standard did an article on the subject, back in 2005, by Edward Green, also an AIDS researcher. He wrotes:

Our secret was that the country that had best succeeded in curbing the spread of HIV--Uganda--had achieved this result without following the formula the experts had been pushing for over 20 years, namely, condoms, drugs, and testing. Instead, Uganda had achieved its unparalleled decline in the prevalence of HIV with a home-grown, low-cost program built around something offensive to conventional experts: promotion of sexual abstinence and fidelity, with condoms promoted only quietly, to high-risk groups and those already infected.

...

Not surprisingly, information about what was actually working in Uganda was unpopular. Condoms have been regarded as the first line of defense for everyone, everywhere, and anyone who disagrees with this orthodoxy has been dismissed as a religious fanatic with "an agenda." Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on condom social marketing (a field I myself worked in for several years) and on related medical-pharmaceutical solutions. How infuriating that an approach not funded by the big donors and scoffed at by foreign experts should prove to
be the very thing that worked best.

This "follow the money" logic only partially explains the reluctance of the AIDS establishment to give full credit to the Ugandan model. They don't really beleive that "partner reduction" is a realistic stratgey. Green tells this story:

CONSIDER THIS VIGNETTE, from the global AIDS conference in Bangkok in July 2004. When Simon Onaba, a 22-year-old Ugandan university student, told an audience of AIDS experts that he had abstained from sex for three years and intended to continue doing so until his wedding night, he was loudly jeered. "Oh, how nice for you!" went one reaction. "You may be able to abstain, but what about a 13-year-old Somali girl forced into marriage and subjected to genital mutilation? She doesn't have the luxury to abstain!" (As if, by choosing abstinence, Simon were somehow failing to take a stand against genital mutilation.) The experts also hurled hostile questions at Simon: How often do you masturbate, and with whom? What's your real agenda for trying to make people believe you are abstaining?
These critics seem to believe that since abstinence and fidelity may not be workable options for 5 percent of the population, they should be rejected altogether, even if they are the best option for 95 percent of the population. These numbers are not arbitrary: By 1995, only 5 percent of Ugandan males and females were reporting casual sex.

As that last figure suggests, reality is very different from the Western experts' perception. Surveys today suggest that more than half of African males and females between the ages of 15 and 19 are abstaining from premarital sex, and increasing proportions of adults are having sex with only one partner. Yet few who work in AIDS prevention have called attention to these important trends, perhaps because they contradict the image of the hypersexed African that Western AIDS experts have been selling since the beginning of the AIDS pandemic. They depict Africans as "polygamous by nature," and supposedly so driven by hormones and poverty that commercial and transactional sex, and the inability to make responsible decisions about sex, are simply part of what it means to be African. If you accept this condescending view, condoms seem to be the only realistic solution to AIDS.

The trouble with the image of the hypersexed African is that it was never true for most Africans. Meanwhile, sexual behavior in Africa has changed. Not only in Uganda, but also perhaps in Senegal, Kenya, and elsewhere, abstinence and faithfulness have worked better than condoms. I document the evidence for Uganda and Senegal
in detail in my 2003 book Rethinking AIDS Prevention. I also show that in about 1999, Kenya switched to a Uganda-style approach. In the past four to five years, casual sex on the part of Kenyan men and women has declined by about 50 percent, and HIV infection rates have fallen.

I wish Helen Epstein every success with her book.