AIDS: Approaches and Funding

[The Gaffer]

And one last contribution for now, then I'll shut up.

Last year, 3 million people died of AIDS worldwide, 14 million children were orphaned and 5 million were newly infected with HIV.

I'd recommend that people read the keynote statement from the AIDS conference in Bangkok in July: UNFPA Statement

Note the emphasis that sex education which promotes condom use also incorporates education that promotes abstinence from sexual activity. It also includes tackling gender discrimination and violence against women.

We need a fully integrated approach if we are to have any chance of stemming this terrible suffering.

There's also a good review piece by George Monbiot in The Guardian. If you can stomach the leftist spin early on, there are some interesting facts further on down. Like, for example, countries where they have no interest in abstinence-only education having the lowest rates of teenage pregnancy.

Here's choice quote:

...what Bush has been up to. When his cherished abstinence programmes failed to reduce the rate of teenage births, he instructed the US Centres for Disease Control to stop gathering data. He also forced them to drop their project identifying the sex education programmes that work, after they found that none of the successful ones were "abstinence only".

Monbiot refers to this systematic review from the British Medical Journal which shows, rather depressingly, that none of the educational programmes had a statistically significant impact on reducing teenage pregnancies, apart from one "multifaceted" approach (not sure what that means). The pooled estimate for abstinence education showed an increase in pregnancies, though it's not statistically significant.

There's not enough evidence here to be categorical, but it's not good news for educational programmes in general and it's looking particularly grim for abstinence-only.