Thursday, March 19, 2009

AIDS Researcher: Pope is Correct About Condoms

Over at Mere Comments they have the news that I'm sure will be in th eheadlines tomorrow...yeah, right. Risk compensation- could that also begin to explain the rise in teen pregnancy?

Thank you, Kathryn Jean Lopez, at NRO, for pointing out the shockingly candid remarks by Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, in response to papal press comments en route to Africa this wee.

“The pope is correct,” Green told National Review Online Wednesday, “or put it a better way, the best evidence we have supports the pope’s comments. He stresses that “condoms have been proven to not be effective at the ‘level of population.’” “There is,” Green adds, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”

It gets better. Read the whole story.

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