Abstinence from Rational Behavior

Joined at the hip with the right wing, this worst administration ever has made a big show of massive funding for AIDs prevention in Africa, with emphasis on promoting abstinence programs. As discussed with ql in comments this morning at Eschaton, the administrators of the actual program ignore this required ignorance because they are actually interested in prevention. Personal knowledge is not the only counterforce against the idiocy, though.

The President's Emergency Plan For Aids Relief (Pepfar), personally initiated by George W Bush, has been described in Washington as the most successful foreign aid programme since the Marshall Plan, and "the best thing that ever happened to the poor people I work with" by one HIV programme leader in Africa. On a recent visit to the continent, Bush was feted as the saviour who has put one and a half million Africans on life-saving drugs.

"We used to sit around fantasising about having unlimited resources," Pisani recalls. "Like winning the lottery." Today, the Aids industry - "or Aids mafia", in her words - effectively has won the lottery. But Pisani is not celebrating. Her book, The Wisdom of Whores, published this week, condemns the global strategy for Aids as an ill-conceived waste of money which is not saving but costing lives.

"HIV is mostly about people doing stupid things in the pursuit of pleasure or money," declares the cover on a proof copy of the book. "We're just not allowed to say so." She suspects she will never work in the Aids industry again for saying so. "But it's true."
(snip)
Even the 20 cents in every US dollar allowed to be spent on prevention is wasted, Pisani argues. A third of the prevention budget has to be allocated to faith-based organisations, which refuse to distribute condoms and will promote only abstinence before marriage. The failure rate of "virginity pledge" programmes among young Americans in the US is about 75%; condoms' failure rate is roughly 2%. Yet Pepfar, Pisani laughs, "claims its policy decisions are 'evidence based'".

This supposed secret has been known by practitioners and DFHs for some time. Pisani admits that she knows her putting out the truth is a career ender for the epidemiologist. The programs, though, are killing people, as Professor Wombat remarked this morning, also in comments. We were discussing the WaPo editorial on the PEPFAR funding that made my blood boil, ignoring all the tenets of AIDs treatment to promote a useless expenditure on the trophy program.

THE PRESIDENT'S Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is American "soft power" at its life-saving best. Since 2003, PEPFAR has supported HIV testing and counseling for more than 33 million people and care for more than 6.6 million (including more than 2.7 million orphans and other children infected and affected by HIV). The program has funded medicine for about 1.5 million men, women and children worldwide, the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Even President Bush's harshest critics concede that PEPFAR, which has cost $15 billion so far, is one of his best accomplishments. When Mr. Bush asked Congress to authorize a five-year, $30 billion extension, Democratic lawmakers in both houses raised the proposed funding level to $50 billion, and legislation sailed through with bipartisan support in both the House and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Then it stopped: Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and six other Republicans have exercised their prerogative to keep it off the Senate floor.

In its effort to support a failed presidency that it promoted, WaPo's editorial poster children will blind themselves to any information, even though it is published in their own news sections.

Abstinence doesn't work. Teaching it instead of actually preventing the spread of AIDs is killing people.

The Texas Education Code, written by the state legislature, requires that classrooms give more attention to abstinence than any other approach and that they must present abstinence as the only method that is 100 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections, HIV/AIDS, and the “emotional trauma associated with adolescent sexual activity.”
(snip)
This lack of sex education is certainly taking a toll:

* Texas ranks number one in teenage births, costing taxpayers there over $1 billion a year. And 24 percent of those births are not the girl’s first delivery.

My comment at WaPo on their editorial about our AIDs program for Africa:

jocabel wrote:
As noted, 33% goes to abstinence - which directs the funds to rightwing groups for the most part, spreading their particular virulence thru the program. This definitely indicates that the U.S. effort is a waste of funds, unless the purpose is proselyting, not a value that the funds are dedicated toward. Coburn has better sense than the worst administration ever.

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McCain Flip-Flop List , my favorite: McCain supported a major campaign-finance reform measure that bore his name. In June 2007, he abandoned his own legislation.