Fight against Aids: How UNAids perpetuated the myth of condom effectiveness in Africa in the face of all the evidence

But its not only sexual behaviour but human behaviour such as cigarette smoking or adopting a healthy diet and exercise.

Such behavioural changes don’t come over night and might take decades and even generations to adopt.

Behaviour change has also been overlooked because there is a certain degree of taboo exists around the subjects such as sexually promiscuity, illegal drug use and prostitution particularly when dealing with relatively conservative African societies.

Officials responsible for prevention programs and policy formation chose not to deal with these behavioural aspects of HIV/AIDS prevention for the simple reason that illegal drug use and sexually promiscuity have moral connotations attached to them.

Furthermore, if one is talking about sexual promiscuity and sub-Saharan Africa there is an added risk of re-enforcing the widely held racial stereotype of the over-sexed African; something that these learned Western-educated men and women would rather have avoided least they be branded as racist.

“Most AIDS programs are more comfortable trying to cope with the medical and scientific aspects of HIV/AIDS rather than its social and behavioural aspects,” says Dr. James Chin, a professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of California at Berkeley and author of he recent book The AIDS Pandemic: the collision of epidemiology with political correctness.

Another bone of contention Chin and other critics of UNAIDS have is the organization’s belief that poverty causes HIV/AIDS; that the AIDS pandemic in Africa and elsewhere in the developing and developed world is fuelled or driven by poverty and discrimination.

Or, to be more precise, that situations of poverty lead to behaviours that are more conducive to the spread of HIV.

For example, poor women in sub-Saharan, and elsewhere in the developed and developing world turn to commercial sex work, putting themselves and their clients at risk, risk that would not exist if such women had not to resort to sex work.

Furthermore, proponents of the poverty-leading-to-AIDS argument say that poverty causes poor nutrition, which weakens immune systems making people more susceptible to HIV infection in the first place.

This belief is highly controversial and has had devastating repercussions for Africa!

“This litany used by UNAIDS and most AIDS programs is socially and politically correct but there are no epidemiological data to support this myth or misconception about HIV transmission,” says Chin. “Poverty is a socially and politically attractive hypothesis to account for high HIV prevalence, but available data support the opposite”.

The data Chin refers to points to the conclusion that poverty and discrimination do not play an obvious role in HIV prevalence (the proportion of people in a given population who are HIV positive at a given time).

For example, the wealthiest countries in sub-Saharan Africa have the highest HIV prevalence rates.

The southern African countries of Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland, for instance, have the highest HIV infection rates on the African continent between 25-40 percent.