How Not to Fight AIDS in Africa

Another fine example of George Bush's ignorance.

President Bush is focusing his program against AIDS in Africa on
sexual abstinence and marital fidelity, relegating condoms to a distant
third. It's the kind of well-meaning policy that bubbles up out of a
White House prayer meeting but that will mean a lot of unnecessary deaths
on the ground in Africa.

The stark reality is that what kills young women here is often not
promiscuity, but marriage. Indeed, just about the deadliest thing a woman
in southern Africa can do is get married.

You would think he would know this, and try to find programs that would
work in Africa. But No. Once again, I set my expectations too high for
the leader of the free world.

Take Kero Sibanda, a woman I met in a village in Zimbabwe. Mrs. Sibanda
is an educated woman and lovely English-speaker who married a man who
could find a job only in another city. She suspected that he had a
girlfriend there, but he would return to the village every couple of
months to visit her.

"I asked him to use a condom," she said, "but he refused. There was
nothing I could do."

He died two years ago, apparently of AIDS. Now Mrs. Sibanda worries that
she and her beautiful 2-year-old daughter, Amanda, have H.I.V. as well.

[...]

The fact is that condoms have played a crucial role in the campaigns
against AIDS that have been relatively successful, from Thailand's "100
percent condom program" to the efforts in Uganda, Cambodia and Senegal.
And condoms don't cause sex any more than umbrellas cause rain.

[...]

at present infection rates in Zimbabwe, 85 percent of today's
15-year-olds will die of AIDS.

Since this is the situation, it just seems very frightening to me that anyone with half a brain, and that might be pushing it for Georgy, would do anything BUT heavily advocate the use of condoms.

His policies are KILLING people! Lots of people that shouldn't be dying. In Iraq. In the U.S. And in Africa.

Some 'culture of life', huh?