Ja: Safer sex week

If you're going to have sex, have safer sex, is the war cry. What about abstinence? What about asserting and reinforcing values that will curb libertine social behaviors amongst the young? The underlying premise of the Safer Sex Week event is that youthful urges cannot be curbed; there is no such thing as self-discipline and societal restraints or inhibitors. Consequently, events like Safer Sex Week are held and they serve to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy. For, giving condoms to young people and high school students is like waving a red rag in front of a bull. There is nothing like a condom burning a hole in the pocket of a teen or a young twenty-something. When you have it, you've got to use it. Besides, the Ministry of Health sponsored the event, so authority figures know we're doing it. That's how young minds work.

The African country of Uganda has shown the world that AIDS cannot be fought with only condoms

Uganda's approaches and interventions especially on the adopted HIV prevention approach; the ABC (A=Abstinence, B=Being faithful to one partner, C=Condom use);

that fighting AIDS requires changing a nation's cultural values and re-orienting them to less risky sexual behaviors; and that success requires a multi-pronged approach. Such changes in a country are possible only if politicians are willing to put themselves and the nation's resources on the line in order to effect them.

A great condom give-away only serves to ensure that young people will become sexually active because the condom removes the barrier that is the fear of pregnancy and creates the illusion of freedom from disease. Nobody tells these young people about condom failure rates, or about the actual inability of condoms to prevent against STDs:

Even if the models used to test condoms are reasonable indicators of whether a condom will break during sex, and thus whether they will function adequately in preventing sperm from reaching the female's reproductive system, but they may be rather poor indicators of whether a microscopic pathogen can pass from one partner to the other. For example, the water test can detect holes only as small as 5 mm, but this sized hole is many times the size of sexually-transmitted viruses and even of the bacterium Chylamidia. Similarly, the airburst test is insensitive to small holes. So here we find new limitations of existing methods of testing condoms: these models don't give us a good understanding of the barrier to pathogens afforded by a condom. That is, these models have serious limitations when considering condoms as barriers to infectious disease.

Whether condoms can adequately protect against STDs is entirely up for grabs as this document reveals. Why subject the young to the risk?