2010-07-21 Huffington Post - Monumental AIDS Breakthrough? (debunks African gel/circ hype)

[Dasher]

The latest klutzy attempts at sidetracking condom use to combat AIDS in Africa have been exposed by researcher John R. Talbott.

In a column entitled "Monumental AIDS Breakthrough -- or is it?" in today's Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-r..._b_654904.html, Talbott not only reveals the newly-announced vaginal gel as a questionable and possibly even harmful tool in preventing AIDS, he also thinks circumcision is just as risky. Because both are excuses for not using condoms. And condoms have a success rate approaching 100%.
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"UNAIDS and the WHO are anxious to report some success in their fight against AIDS given that their attempts at finding a vaccine so far have failed and their donors are getting impatient. To date, they are betting on this gel for women and circumcision for men as tools to prevent AIDS transmission. But, their circumcision studies suffer the same problem with statistics that this gel study has, a 50% reported reduction in annual transmission rates with circumcision does not mean you will be 50% less likely to get the illness over your lifetime, just 50% less likely to be ill at the end of the first year. Because people have many sexual encounters over many years, such reductions in annual infection rates will do little to reduce the incidence of AIDS in Africa over a lifetime. In addition, the circumcision field studies are suspect because for obvious reasons it was impossible to conduct double blind experiments when circumcision is the treatment being examined, men have a way of knowing if their genitals have been cut and so may change behavior accordingly."
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What is ironic is that the WHO unsuspectingly distributed smallpox vaccine in Africa in 1975 which was laced with AIDS developed between 1969 and 1972 in U.S. laboratories.