News

By James Tillman

WASHINGTON, DC, June 23, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com)—The U.S. Government has spent over $2 million on a study designed to increase condom use among injection drug users (IDUs) and their sexual partners – in Kazakhstan.

Nabila El-Bassel of Columbia University, the principal investigator, justified the relevance of the study saying it “addresses a significant public health threat of HIV, HVC, and other STIs among a very high risk population of active IDUs and their sexual partners in Kazakhstan – a region that is experiencing one of the fastest rising HIV epidemics in the world.”

The study relied on recruiting participants from a needle exchange program at Shu, a city of about 35,000 in southern Kazakhstan.  The city is located along a drug trafficking route, and a large proportion of its population uses injection drugs.

By couples-based interventions, the program aims to reduce the number of injections made using shared needles and to increase the proportion of sexual encounters in which condoms are used.  These measures are meant to decrease the incidence of new HIV, HCB, Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis cases.

Between $680,000 and $670,000 dollars were given to the program each year in 2008, 2009, and 2010.

The U.S. has often given 'foreign aid' to other nations in the form of condoms, and has been the largest condom donor in the world, contributing more than nine billion condoms to foreign countries.

Domestically, President Obama recently called on Congress to eliminate funding for abstinence education and instead fund condom and contraceptive-based sex education.

He appointed Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the “Get Some NYC Condom” campaign as New York City Health Commissioner, as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In addition, the Obama stimulus bill contained $335 million set aside for condoms and sexually explicit “STD prevention” programs.