At 10:10 AM 4/6/5, Jed Rothwell wrote: >I assume that the term "95% effective" means that 5% >fail mechanically. [snip] >If everyone in a society uses condoms, the spread of AIDS will be >stopped instantly, and eventually the disease will go extinct because I do >not think it survives outside the human body.
I've read anecdotal evidence some virus spilled on a lab bench top and was left for several days and was subsequently cultured. I don't know how much research has actually been done on this, or how important it is. It doesn't offhand strike me as an important issue with regard to infection rate. At 8:55 AM 4/6/5, leaking pen wrote: >thanks jed, beat me to it. but yes, acutally, there was a study done >that showed that about 5 percent of condoms used correctly failed >mechanically, usually as a result of being past the expiration date (a >higher problem in the third world). ill have to hunt down the study. >and theres a higher failure rate for improper use, which is more users >than youd think. The above information is roughly consistent with what I remember reading, but it has been a while and I can't count much on my memory. You both seem to roughly agree though. If there is indeed an overall average mechanical failure rate of 5 percent, then suggesting the use of condoms will stop aids is utterly erroneous and immoral. A male with aids who has a typical sexual encounter rate of about a couple times a week, and even uses a condom every time, will experience about five failures a year. That's five occasions of unprotected sex. The only thing condom use does, even if everyone uses them all the time, is slow down the rate of infections per encounter. The overall process, the annual infection rate, is still exponential, so the same number of people will ultimately get the disease unless a cure is found, it will just take a bit longer. That is the nature of exponential processes. Now that the lives of the infected are extended by medication, I would expect the total annual infection cases should now be increasing in places where such medication is available, unless a monogamous behavior increase has offset that effect. Even if you get everbody to use condoms this condom use then drops the infections per infected male to 1/20 the unprotected rate, but if the infected live 10 years instead of 2 the total infections per infected individual drops to only 1/4 the rate of a population that is fully unprotected, instead of the expected 1/20. Since the annual infection rate remains exponential with or without condoms, the final outcome remains the same unless a cure is found early on. Condoms therefore are not a solution. In fact, deluding uninfected people who are otherwise chaste or monogamous into thinking condoms make for "safe sex" merely moves them from a protected group into a group that will ultimately be overrun by the exponential process. Using the term "safe sex" as synonymous with condom use is therefore deadly in the extreme. It does not seem to me that religious beliefs and moral stances should cloud this issue, which is purely a quantitative one. Either these assertions are facts or not. It is important to society as a whole, and to all individuals at risk, to know if touting condom use as safe sex leads to more deaths from aids. Regards, Horace Heffner
