Beyond ABC: New Approaches to Preventing HIV

For many years, governments and non-governmental organizations have promoted an ABC approach to preventing HIV and AIDS. ABC stands for Abstain from sex until marriage, Be faithful to a single partner, and use a Condom every time you have sex. ABC has some known limitations. This video discusses those limitations and additional things we can do to prevent the spread of HIV. SAVE stands for Safer practices, Access to antiretroviral medications, Voluntary counseling and testing, and Empowerment/Education. DEF stands for Disclosure in safety, Education/empowerment, and Female-controlled prevention methods. Medically performed male circumcision with counseling can also reduce the risk that men will contract HIV via heterosexual intercourse. This video is freely downloadable from http://www.archive.org/details/aidsvideos_beyond_abc . Visit http://www.GlobalLifeworks.org and http://AIDSvideos.org to learn more. Disabled accessibility: The transcript for this and many other AIDSvideos.org videos can be downloaded from http://aidsvideos.org/translate.shtml . [Do you want to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS? Are you fluent in a language other than English? Then volunteer to translate our videos into other languages! Click http://AIDSvideos.org/translate.shtml to to learn how you can help!!! © Copyright 2007-2011 Global Lifeworks. All rights reserved. This work is licensed to be used for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.]

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• hiv
• aids
• prevention
• education
• ABC
• abstinence
• be
• faithful
• condom
• SAVE
• safer
• access
• antiretroviral
• voluntary
• counseling

[kaled17]

So Dr.,

I just need a stright answer is using condom correctly means preventing AIDS ?

[AIDSvideos]

This is Eric; I'm not a doctor. The straight answer is that "using a condom correctly every time for every sexual act greatly reduces, but does not completely eliminate, the risk of contracting or transmitting HIV." See our vid "The Importance of Condom Compliance" for more info.

[sltr1]

Oh and men are going to listen to counseling. These are people who think that sleeping with a virgin will rid them of HIV. Google the "Hawthorn effect".

You missed out 10.

[sltr1]

How is it a silly argument? There is a finite amount of money in the pot. If you pour money into one method of treatment, less money is given to other methods. Circumcision costs about $250 per circumcision. Health care infrastructure is weak to non-existent. There are going to be many botched circumcisions as corners are cut. It is clear that education, condom-provision and testing facilities will be more effective.

[AIDSvideos]

... activists to raise doubts by any means possible about what three well-designed, well-executed, peer-reviewed studies have shown about MPCWC's efficacy for HIV prevention and to obsfucate the results and change the subject. Compared to the other article, it is "slightly more cleverly-written crap." If these articles are the best the anti-circumcision movement can do, give up now. I lack the time to teach your advocates deductive reasoning and ethical persuasion one YT comment at a time.

[AIDSvideos]

... then raises a bunch of potential objections to the methodology (most or all of which were in fact dealt with in the experimental design) and hypothetical reasons without evidence that MPCWC might not work in the "real world." Well, burden of proof is now on the anti-circ activists to demonstrate that MPCWC will fail in general use even though it succeeded in three separate trials with 1000s of participants. I could go on. This article is another desperate attempt by anti-circumcision ...

[AIDSvideos]

... outrageously claims that since these trials (by design) controlled other variables in order to render a verdict on the single issue of whether MPCWC protecs against HIV infection, the results are therefore "de-contextualised." That's absurd. It then weakly and vaguely claims that "this research methodology has its critics," which is the weakest of all critiques; EVERYTHING, including childhood vaccination, fluoridation of water, and evidence that we landed on the moon has "critics." It ...

[AIDSvideos]

... is pointless since circumcision is a far more common procedure than hysterectomy and you'd EXPECT a higher absolute number of articles about it (and about adverse effects) on that basis alone. Comparing the % of articles about adverse effects is also pointless. The question is, does MPCWC save lives in areas where HIV is highly prevalent, and the answer is a resounding "yes!" The article also falsely suggests that waiting for the evidence from the trials was a "procedural nicety." It ...

[AIDSvideos]

The article also resorts to unethical persuasion techniques by deceptively suggesting that since differing circ rates can't fully explain all aspects of HIV epidemiology in the U.S., there must be some problem with the evidence of protective effect. There's not. This is called a "straw man." No one is suggesting that male circ is the sole factor determining all aspects of HIV epidemiology in the U.S. It compares the # of articles about adverse affects of circumcision vs hysterectomy, which ...

[AIDSvideos]

... a higher standard of proof and arguing that we need to satisfy that (conveniently for them, arbitrarily high) standard before rolling out the program in practice. It's a contrived argument that's dead wrong and motivated out of a rigid opposition to circumcision for anyone, scientific evidence of protective effect notwithstanding. It's politicized with unscientific and subjective pejorative terms like "masculinist" and the ridiculous claim that HIV/AIDS science is "masculinist." (It's not.)

[AIDSvideos]

That one's slightly less dishonest because it's at least honest enough to acknowledge that possible explanations for the protective effect DO exist and to acknowledge the research literature correlating high circ rates with low HIV prevalence rates. But since the radical anti-circ activists have justifiably lost the scientific debate about whether MPCWC reduces a male's risk of contracting HIV through heterosexual sex, the article attempts to shift the terms of the debate by inventing ...

[sltr1]

They may not be exactly alike, but they are certainly closer to each other than Africa and the USA. Yet as you can see from the links I posted 5 days ago, these trials are being used to promote routine infant circ in the USA. So who here has invalid inductive reasoning?