3 Harvard Expert Restates Support for Pope's Position Irish Times March 30

The Director of Harvard University’s HIV Prevention Research Project has repeated his support for Pope Benedict’s recent controversial claim that condom distribution was worsening the AIDS problem in Africa. Explaining that he wasn’t a Catholic and wasn’t talking about condoms “in any sort of moral-ethical sense”, Dr Edward Green said he was “talking about what has been found to work and not work”.

In an interview with William Crawley on BBC Radio Ulster’s “Sunday Sequence” programme, Dr Green said studies had shown “there is not a single country in Africa where HIV prevalence has come down primarily because of condoms”. “We now see HIV going down”, he added, “in about eight or nine countries in Africa, and in every case we see a decrease in the proportion of men and women who report having more than one sex partner in the past year.”

He continued, “So, when the pope said that the answer really lies in monogamy and marital faithfulness, that’s exactly what we found empirically. We have, for a number of years now, found the wrong kind of association between condom-availability and levels of condom use. You see the wrong kind of relationship with HIV prevalence. Instead of seeing this associated with lower HIV infection rates, it’s actually associated with higher HIV infection rates. Part of that is because the people using condoms are the people who are having risky sex”.