Despite U.S. Efforts, Ugandans Still Like Sex

A new study suggests that Uganda -- long the darling of abstinence-only cheerleaders -- isn't getting much out of the Bush administration's insistence on pairing HIV/AIDS funding with abstinence-only lessons. President Bush's plan to fight HIV/AIDS abroad, PEPFAR, will dole out $15 billion to 15 countries over five years, but the plan mandates that a third of that money must go toward abstinence-until-marriage efforts. Uganda is usually trotted out as evidence that this might be a good plan.

In other bad news for friends of abstinence, MTV comes to Africa this week.

Comments

[sage]

I thought the program in Uganda that was working so well was ABC:

Abstain, Be faithful to your partner, or use a Condom. I hardly see how one needs to spend 15B$ to get that message out.

[Chuck]

sage,

shows how much you know. Without the $15B, where would we get all the assistant-under-deputy-directors for managing the Swiss bank accounts? And their secretaries? And drivers? And in-laws?

Duhhh....

[sage]

Sorry Chuck, I wasn't thinking.

[zeroentitlement]

Sage, you've grossly overblown the amount spent on abstinence-only programs. It's one-third of $15 billion. Only $5 billion.

Surely for $5 billion, they could get a couple of nice billboards that say "Keep It In Your Pants" in various Ugandan languages.

[Kim]

Scoff as much as you want, but remember that aids education in these countries has been beset by things like using broom sticks to show people how to use condoms, and then later finding that they are just putting condoms on broomsticks. Education is expensive, especially in countries with limited electronic media and low literacy among the populace. It's not going to be free, but treating people for aids is much more expensive.

[kwais]

Kim,
Every dollar we spend donate to them is bad for us and it is bad for them.

If they have an aids epidemic, take the people you are trying to educate to see some aids victims, and then ask them if they want to end up like that. They will figure it out.

[Lord Duppy]

It certainly doesnt help that it's a common belief throughout Africa that if you have HIV, you can get rid of it by raping a virgin.

[kwais]

Maybe if you show the sex ed class a guy in dying of aids in an African prison because he raped a virgin, that would help?

I wonder, at some point Darwinism kicks in and those virgins with guns, and those people that wear condoms survive and all the rest die of AIDs.

[Lord Duppy]

Yeah, kwais, maybe eventually a condom-wearing gene will emerge 😀

More likely that people will develop resistance. And they don't need UN funding to do it, either.

[internetguy]

I am the undersecretary to the top minister in Uganda. While I have already run off with the $5 billion, I need your help to move it out of the country. Simply email me your bankaccount number and social security number, and I will transfer the money into it. You will get $200,000,000 (two hundred million) for your services.

[Akira MacKenzie]

Of course, it never occured to the Bushies that the 15 Billion might be better spent actually finding a vaccine or cure for HIV than trying to foist X-ian misinformation about sex on the Ugandan people.

After all, God sent AIDS to Earth to kill the faggots and the niggers and make the world safe for straight whites, right? 😉

[sage]

Akira, you've reminded me of a line from a song by Rage Against the Machine:

AIDS is killing the entire African Nation,

and a vaccine is still *supposedly* under preparation,

But these governments, they don't mind the procrastination,

They say we'll kill them off, take their land, and go there for vacation...

[Akira MacKenzie]

Sage:

I wouldn't go as far as that bunch of millionaire Marxists (never thought I'd use those two words together), but I do think that there is a bit of foot dragging on the part of conservatives when it comes to finding any medical means of defeating HIV. The Right loves the specter of AIDS for 2 reasons: 1) It scares heterosexuals into having the sexual relationships that THEY approve of (i.e. married, monogamous, in the missionary position, and for procreation only), 2) it scares EVERYONE about homosexuals. Granted, this is anecdotal, but I've heard many of my old College Republican classmates say that they never find a cure for AIDS because it would lead to "sexual chaos."

As for blacks; well, when you scratch the surface of a homophobe, chances are you'll find a racist.

[Celia Farber]

REASON readers are usually very astute but the elementals of truth vs fiction on the subject of HIV/AIDS in Africa seem to have been neglected.

This jibberish about condoms and abstinence and virgins and broomsticks really leads us nowhere.

A few points of fact that the media and AIDS industries refuse to address:

1. Contrary to popular hysteria about a decimating epidemic of infectuous immune suppression in Africa that was supposed to leave some African nations bereft of people entirely by the turn of the century, the popultion of Sub Saharan Africa has grown from 378 million in 1980 to 652 million in 2000. It has grown by 274 million, in other words--the size of the entire US population. (Source: But--What About Africa? D. Rasnick, C. Fiala, BMJ/2003)

2. Western HIV researchers have agreed that it takes on average 1000 sexual contacts with HIV positive partners for HIV to transmit. Rasnick and Fiala wrote: "The number of random sexual contacts needed to spread a sexually transmitted HIV epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa is a straight forward calculation. Since only 1 in 26 (24.5 million per 652 million) of Sub Saharan Africans was HIV positive in 2000, each of the 24.5 million must have had an average of 1000 x 26= 26,000 sexual contacts to reach the 1000 HIV positive contacts needed to acquire and to spread an epidemic. It strains creulity to accept that poor, hungry Sub Saharan Africans are engaging in such levels of sexual promiscuity."

Put more simply, I would ask those of you who still are able to maintain the belief that HIV is spreading sexually "rampantly" in Africa, via heterosexual sex, but NOT AT ALL in the west--What kind of highly unusual sex do you believe they are having in Africa?

How could their epidemiology possibly be so different from ours, if indeed the pathogen is the same?

If indeed something is deeply wrong with the model, and HIV is not spreading like wildfire in Africa-- what might account for the "extremely high prevalence" of HIV positives one always reads about, including Uganda, formerly the "epicenter of the pandemic?"

Well, for a start, I submit two facts:

1. The antibody test that is used in Africa is extemely problematic and could by itself explain the mystery. It is cheap and wildly inaccurate. It is never used for diagnostic purposes in the West. The ELISA HIV antibody test cross-reacts with dozens (up to 60) of non HIV-specific proteins, endemic to the regions, including those for malaria, tb, and even pregnancy. (This was published in Bio/Technology in the early 1990s by a group of Australian researchers known as the Perth Group, whose deconstruction of the claims made for HIV is extensive, formidable, and available online.)

In other words, and as has been amply demonstrated: The technology is creating the illusion of mass "infection" with HIV.

2. The Bangui definition of AIDS in Africa, established in 1987 is very generic and broad. The three main features are: Diarrhea, fever, chronic cough, and secondary features include vomiting and abdominal pain.

These are also the symptoms of most tropical diseases.

Across Africa, TB, when there is a positive HIV antibody test, is renamed AIDS because the two are clinically identical. And as I said above, the antibody positive test can itself result from the underlying TB.

It's time to explore the possibility that the beliefs we've held as a culture about sexually transmittable immune suppression (AIDS) in Africa are distorted and even delusional. I'll avoid the word racist, but that is the inescapable conclusion, when people start to talk about rumors of African men trying to cure AIDS ny raping virgins. Does anybody have a SOURCE for this fairly insane statement that keeps making the rounds?

I have traveled extensively throughout Africa in search of answers to these mysterious questions. I certainly never saw a stitch of evidence for the raped virgin, or for that matter the "dry sex" people epak of at places like the Village Voice.
One encounter that really stayed with me took place in the Rakai district of Uganda, in 1993. I walked into a village by the roadside and a man came over to greet me, clasping my hands. "Madam," he said. "Please understand that we must procreate."
He thought I was there to preach condoms.
I assured him I was not a CDC missionary but only a journalist who wanted to discuss "slim disease." (AIDS)

"Terrible," he said. "I have had two brothers and one sister die of AIDS already."

"I'm sorry," I said. "What did they die of?"

"Slim. AIDS."

"I mean what was the cause of death?"

"Ahh. Well, my brother for instance, he had malaria and we couldn't afford to get him treatment, so he died."

"So he died of unreated malaria," I offered.

"Yes, malaria."

"Why did you say he died of AIDS?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Slim is a formula for everything. When somebody dies, we call it slim."

(SPIN, April 1993, Farber)

Sorry this post is lengthy but I hope we can begin to talk about AIDS in Africa in a more realistic and evidence based way, here and in other parts of the American media.

Celia Farber
NYC