NCBC piece on the Pope and condoms

The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia has a good piece on The Pope and Condoms by Matthew Hanley.
An exhaustive review of the impact of condom promotion on actual HIV transmission in the developing world concluded that condoms have not been responsible for turning around any of the severe African epidemics. This rigorous study was originally commissioned by UNAIDS, and conducted by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco. Instead of welcoming the findings, and adapting HIV prevention strategies accordingly, UNAIDS first tried to alter the findings, and ultimately refused to publish them. The findings were so threatening to UNAIDS that the researchers were finally forced to publish them on their own in another, peer-reviewed journal.
The report referred to was published by Norman Hearst and Sanny Chen in "Studies in Family Planning" for March 2004. The website of the journal has an abstract of the article. For further discussion, see UNAids and myth of condoms efficacy against Aids in the East African. This refers to another article of interest: "AIDS and the irrational" by Helen Epstein in the BMJ for November 2008. The article by

The National Catholic Bioethics Center will be publishing Matthew Hanley’s book, with Jokin de Irala, M.D., “Avoiding AIDS, Affirming Love: What the West Can Learn from Africa,” this Summer. That should be well worth looking out for.

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