News

KAMPALA, July 22, 2002 (LSN.ca) – Uganda may be on its way to wiping out AIDS by using a strategy based on chastity and fidelity, according to findings in a Harvard University study. The Harvard study credits abstinence education with “significant effectiveness in reducing AIDS in Uganda,” a newswire reports—“with the HIV infection rate dropping 50 percent between the years 1992 and 2000.”  Uganda uses billboards, radio announcements and chastity-based curricula to promote abstinence and faithfulness. The result has been a gradual, steady drop in HIV infection rates. If the report is welcomed honestly and with a real commitment to reduce suffering, then Uganda could become a model for worldwide AIDS prevention.  Harvard’s study found that from the late 1980s to 2001, the number of pregnant women infected with HIV dropped from 21.2 percent to 6.2 percent. By contrast in Botswana, where condoms are officially promoted as the solution rather than part of the problem, 38 percent of pregnant women were HIV-positive in 2001.  “Much of the program’s success,” reports said, “is due to the nation’s willingness to look beyond the sexual revolution to the past, before the adoption of corrupt Western sexual mores. The study found Ugandan adults were less promiscuous from 1989 to 2000: of women 15 and older, those reporting multiple sexual partners dropped from 18.4 percent to 2.5 percent.  Promoters of promiscuous sex and condoms tried to discredit the findings. “Ugandans really never took to condoms,” said Dr. Vinand Nantulya, an infectious disease advisor to Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni, in the New Republic magazine.  To read coverage in the New Republic:  https://www.thenewrepublic.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020527&s=allen052702