Is condom and lubricant promotions working for the HIV/AIDS Interventions?

Written by
Mac-Darling Cobbinah

HIV/AIDS have been described as the killer disease that kills millions in Africa today. The majority of the people killed by HIV are considered to be women due to the physical make-up, which place them at the receiving end during sexual intercourse.

Children recently have also been affected and infected with the HIV virus because most of these innocent babies are born with the virus from an infected mother (Mother-child transmission). The affected children most times have their parents dead before their birth or sometime after birth.

The write shall analyze the various preventive methods that have been used for HIV/AIDS educational purposes over the years, as well as pointing out some unavoidable pitfalls and proposing a way forward.

In Africa, HIV has been tackled around the various taboos on sex and sexuality issues. Most part of Africa do not talk about sex in public and difficult to even discuss it in privacy with family and friends. But HIV has made this possible recently. Though issues around sex are now discussed around Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), which include HIV. There are lots of other important issues that have been left out in the debate. Without inclusion of all the factors in the HIV prevention business, little progress will be made while countries like Ghana will continue to sit on a timed bomb.

The issue of increased homosexual activities is also an important factor to be given a voice in the society to enable effective prevention work since most homosexuals are forced due to social and family pressure to get married and give birth to children. Most homosexuals have girl friends and wives. Recently, one of the clients I counseled and screened for HIV happens to be married to a beautiful woman though he reacted to the HIV virus. The question therefore is how can these issues be dealt with to allow women and men take control of their sexual lives and live happily based on their sexuality. Since this is not my main theme, I will leave this to be talk about later.

The main preventive measures used in Africa, which are mainly known as the ABC method. A, stands for abstinence which will help young people who are not engaged in any sexual interactions to remain virgins or those engaged in sexual activities to refrain and maintain their virginity before they get married and get into a partnership. The B, which deals with being faithful have been left out of the campaign over the years and though talked about my programmers and peer educators, they do not stress on the need to remain faithful to the people they reach. The issue is how do you promote faithfulness when you sell a box of condom and 20 piece of lubricant to someone and expect him or her to use it within a month and come for more or buy more?
The C, which deals with condom use also for me is not an effective preventive tool and believe we must look for other means for prevention such as dealing with behaviors that puts people at risk and issues faced by individuals and groups that make them have multiple sexual partners. Some of these issues are sometimes basic as poverty of the mind, illiteracy in sexual issues, gender and sexuality.

Though there are other means or preventing HIV, I think and maintain the fact that we don’t need more ways of prevention methods but need to enforce the best one among these many prevention strategies. Don’t ask the hungry man to buy and use condoms during sex, I believe is a waste of time. Also it is not convincing enough to ask the sex worker to stop when there are no other alternative means of survival. Let us deal with the basics and avoid the rush for new things just to enable more funds to be embezzling in the name of