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UGANDA-HIV prevalence has now declined in seven countries hit hard by AIDS, and two experts from Harvard University attribute the progress to behavioral changes such as an increase in abstinence and partner reduction rather than to widely-touted condom distribution."In every case, a few years before we notice prevalence going down, we see that the proportion of men and women who report having more than one sex partner in the past year goes down significantly," Edward Green, a senior research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Baptist Press."In almost all cases, we've seen the rate of premarital sex going down significantly. And condom use can either go up or down or stay the same. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference," Green said from Uganda, where he was conducting more research.The seven countries that have shown signs of declining infection rates include Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and urban Zambia, Ethiopia, Haiti and Malawi, Green said.Foreign donors continue to push condom distribution and AIDS testing as prevention methods while disputing the effectiveness of the ABC method that has seen so much success in Uganda and elsewhere, Green said. The method teaches abstinence, being faithful to one partner and using condoms in high-risk situations."The major donors are putting all this money into condom promotion, HIV testing, treating STDs and trying to develop microbicides -- which have not shown to be effective," he said. "All of these much-touted interventions have not been shown to have any impact in generalized epidemics in Africa."The sad thing is that even in Uganda, the national AIDS program has been largely redesigned by foreign donors to no longer emphasize the messages that were successful in reducing Uganda's epidemic -- faithfulness and partner reduction, and abstinence for young people. "Condoms have had impact in certain high-risk groups, such as prostitutes in Thailand and Cambodia. But condoms have not had an impact in any general population or in any country where HIV is mostly in the general population, such as most of those in Sub-Saharan Africa," Green said. Allison Herling Ruark, a research fellow with the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, told Baptist Press that foreign donors often refuse to believe that abstinence and faithfulness messages work and instead contend that behavior is ingrained and efforts to change it are futile."I think people just aren't aware that there's good evidence of behavior changes," Ruark said. "Even in Uganda where those changes happened 20 years ago and they're so well-known, they're not always as well known as they should be. "People often think it's difficult to measure behavioral changes, but we really don't think it is. You can ask people questions about their sexual behavior, and you can look at trends over time," she said. "We have been doing this for condom use for many years."Organizations that distribute condoms or provide treatment for sexually transmitted infections are easily able to keep a numerical tab of their efforts, Ruark noted, whereas the links between informational messages and behavior change are more challenging to substantiate.To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah....
