AIDS Hitting Youth Hard; HIV Infections Up in Homosexual Communities
by Ed Vitagliano
December 2, 2003
(AgapePress) - The rate of young people ages 15-24 contracting HIV/AIDS worldwide is alarming, according to the United Nations.
A recent report from the UN's Population Fund estimates that a young person somewhere in the world contracts HIV every 14 seconds, and that half of all new cases of HIV/AIDS are in that age group. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 8.6 million young people are infected with the disease.
The UN, however, continues to emphasize the use of condoms as the primary weapon against the spread of AIDS, even though an "abstinence-only" approach has proved effective in places like Africa.
In Uganda, for example, health officials in the mid-1990s changed the "safer-sex" emphasis to one in which abstinence until marriage was strongly encouraged. That nation had one of the worst AIDS problems in the world in the early part of that decade -- with 30% of its population infected. Following the change in priority, however, Uganda's AIDS infection rate has fallen to its current 10% level.
"Abstinence remains the best strategy, especially for the risk group aged 15-25 years," Kenyan HIV/AIDS activist Dorothy Kwenze told the Cybercast News Service earlier this year. "The concept has worked well for Uganda and can work equally well for other African countries."
A study by epidemiologist Rand Stoneburner also determined that Uganda's AIDS strategy, if implemented across the continent, could reduce Africa's AIDS cases by 80% -- even in the nations with the worst infection rates.
New Study: 1 in 7 Homosexuals Have AIDS
A recent report revealed that one in every seven sexually active homosexual men in Seattle is infected with HIV/AIDS, causing great concern among the city's health officials.
While those figures are startling, they are in line with what is happening in other homosexual enclaves throughout the nation. The number of HIV infections in the homosexual community has been increasing for the last half decade.
Chief among the causes of the rise: numerous sexual partners, anonymous sex, and the increasingly risky sexual activity of homosexual men -- both those who are already infected and those who aren't -- who have sex without condoms. Some HIV-positive homosexual men are even having sex without revealing their disease status to their partners.
"Transmitting HIV knowingly is an act of violence," said a document issued by a Seattle-King County homosexual health task force. "We are accountable for our behavior -- to ourselves, our sex partners and our community." The task force recommendations, however, are nothing new: using condoms, avoiding the use of drugs prior to having sex, and honesty between potential sex partners about HIV status.
According to one homosexual news source, health officials in other cities will be watching Seattle to see if, this time, homosexual men heed the warnings.
Ed Vitagliano, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is news editor for AFA Journal, a publication of the American Family Association. These two articles appeared in the November/December 2003 issue.
