Abstinence Slowing AIDS in Uganda
by AFA Journal
June 8, 2005
(AgapePress) - The nation of Uganda has been celebrated as an example of how a Third World nation can successfully combat AIDS. How that decline occurred has been a subject of great interest to public health officials in the West.In the early 1990s, Uganda had one of the worst AIDS problems in the world, with 30 percent of its population infected with the fatal disease. Since that time, Uganda's AIDS infection rate has fallen to its current 10 percent level.
According to Dr. Edward C. Green, anthropologist and senior research scientist in the School of Public Health at Harvard University, the remarkable turnaround in Uganda was based on what was called the "ABC approach." Since the early 1990s government and health officials have been encouraging their people to Abstain, Be faithful to their spouse or partner, and use Condoms if A and B fail. Teenagers were actively encouraged to wait until marriage before having sex.
Government officials in Uganda claim that the more traditional approach -- rather than relying on condoms -- was the major reason for the decline in AIDS. Janet Museveni, the nation's First Lady, gave credit at a World AIDS Day event to "the time-tested message of abstinence from premarital sex and faithfulness in marriage."
One might think that health experts would embrace such good news, but Green said nothing could be further from the truth. He said that he and his fellow researchers presented their studies to officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal agency in the U.S. responsible for dispensing government moneys to combat AIDS in Africa. Green told them that "the key factor in the decline was less casual sex, more fidelity ... more abstinence among youth." However, he added, USAID officials and others "were evidently horrified by what we said."
Why were they horrified? According to Vinand Nantulya, a senior advisor at the United Nation's Global Fund, USAID officials rejected the evidence "because the studies were not showing that the condoms were the only things that worked."
Moreover, an investigative article in Citizen magazine charged that USAID may be attempting to cover up research like Green's. The agency "has shelved scientific evidence showing that the ABC strategy is much more effective at reducing AIDS in the Third World than simply handing out condoms," said the author of the article, Candi Cushman.
She said Green's research has not been published by USAID. Furthermore, the agency demoted Green as head of the study task force and hired a well-known advocate of the condom-based approach instead. Now an entirely new approach to Uganda's success story is being written, and Green said it will tout condoms as the successful ingredient in the African nation's approach.
But that story is not the truth. "You cannot show that more condoms had led to less AIDS in Africa," Green said.
This article appeared in the June 2005 issue of AFA Journal, a monthly publication of the American Family Association.
