a slippery slope

“New research in monkeys suggests a combination of AIDS drugs applied as a vaginal gel might prevent infection with HIV,” the Washington Post reports today. Thank-goodness we can all go back to having sex with AIDS infected whoevers.

This is reprehensible medicine. Condoms, with their Federal-government-reported 13% failure rate, are bad enough. But at least when a condom fails, you’re going to know. But a gel? How effective will that be? If the use of spermicidal gel is any indication, a gel could lower the risk of infection to a mere 26%. This number jives with the findings of the researchers, whose 28 monkeys contracted an AIDS-like virus at a rate of %25.

But this goo is even more insidious when you consider that the researchers are glowing about this new remedy’s use in third-world countries. They would send a faulty, ineffective disease prevention product into a part of the world which desperately needs real help, not silver-bullet panacea’s.

But now the icing on the cake: “The International Partnership for Microbicides said in a statement that women are ‘often powerless to abstain from sex or to insist on condom use.’” Ok, kids, What do abortion, the pill and this new medicated motion lotion all have in common? That’s right, they’re all yucky. But they also all throw responsibility for the consequences of sexual intercourse onto the woman. Men castigate women for not jacking up their bodies with the pill, coerce them to have abortions and now, coup-de-grace: if she gets AIDS its her fault, not mine. Just beautiful.

If this were a measure for preventing the spread of a highly infectious terminal disease between cattle, it wouldn’t pass muster. But this ain’t cattle. The impact of this gel as policy, as cultural factor will be the inadequate protection of individuals, which translates to infections and to deaths which needn’t have happened. Women will be encouraged to use this stuff, when they ought, for their health’s sake, to hold out for a better way to protect themselves from aids.