A very interesting op/ed from the Washington Post.

An excerpt:

Yet rarely seen among Botswana’s AIDS prevention messages is one that has worked in other African countries: Multiple sex partners kill. Dubbed “Zero Grazing” by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, this approach dominated in East Africa, where several countries curbed HIV rates.

Fidelity campaigns never caught on in Botswana. Instead, the country focused on remedies favored by Western AIDS experts schooled in the epidemics of America’s gay community or Thailand’s brothels, where condom use became so routine it slowed the spread of HIV.

These experts brought not just ideas but money, and soon billboards in Botswana touted condoms. Schoolchildren sang about them. Cadres of young women demonstrated how to roll them on. The anti-AIDS partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and drugmaker Merck budgeted $13.5 million for condom promotion—25 times the amount dedicated to curbing dangerous sexual behavior.

But soaring rates of condom use have not brought down high HIV rates. Instead, they rose together, until both were among the highest in Africa.”

I’ve said many times before that the key to solving the AIDS problem is encouraging people to a) not have promiscuous sex and b) refrain from using intravenous drugs.  Abstaining from these two things makes your chances of getting HIV next to zero.  Yet the liberals insist that we cannot focus on abstinence or monogamy as a way to combat AIDS because, according to them, we have to recognize that these people will have sex whether we like it or not.

Yet it seems to me that recognizing that, and pretending like we can’t educate and change human behavior, is costing millions of African lives.  Not to mention lives in other parts of the country as well.