Posted by
Maudie in Mandeville on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 3:53:00 PM
'Carla Bruni has issued a
scathing attack on Pope Benedict XVI saying that she has
allowed her Catholic faith to lapse because of his approach to contraception in Africa.'
Because of a condom?? Who believes that one?
11/10/2008 A health advisor for Barack Obama says the incoming president will overturn a successful anti-AIDS policy President Bush has employed in Africa that has been based on abstinence education.
The policy has significantly reduced AIDS rates and local leaders of nations such as Uganda have applauded it.
The focus on abstinence has paid dividends where it has been used extensively, such as in Uganda, where the rates of AIDS have gone down by half during the last decade.
Washington-area investigative writer Carey Roberts wrote in a Washington Times article in late 2004 that Uganda has been using abstinence to combat AIDS for 15 years.
"The results were impressive: the HIV infection rate in Uganda dropped from 15 percent to 5 percent. In 1991, 21 percent of pregnant women had the deadly HIV virus. Ten years later, that figure had dropped to 6 percent," Roberts wrote in the Times article.
In fact, only 6.2% of Ugandans in the 15-49 age group are now HIV-positive, compared with more than 15% in the early 1990s.
Professor Francis Omaswa, the director of Uganda's health ministry, said abstinence was the reason for the decline.
"[Condoms] are not the main reason for the drop in our HIV rates," Omaswa explained to the London Sunday Herald. "Our most important achievement has been to change sexual behavior.