I've read anecdotal evidence some virus spilled on a lab bench top and was
left for several days and was subsequently cultured.
That might happen with some viruses but not AIDS. Oxygen kills it.
If there is indeed an overall average mechanical failure rate of 5 percent . . .
That seems very unlikely to me, but if this true it can be fixed with better education and by throwing away expired stocks of condoms. Condoms are widely used in Japan and I would be astounded to learn the failure rate there is 5%. Of course Japanese people are literate and educated, and their drug stores carefully monitor inventory.
. . . then suggesting the use of condoms will stop aids is utterly erroneous and immoral.
You misunderstand some basic statistics here. Any technique that reduces infection rates by a factor of 20 is *enormously* effective. If we could reduce any form of cancer by a factor of 20 with something as simple and cheap as a condom, that would be front page news worldwide, and the discoverer would win the Nobel prize. Also, you have not considered what I described as the Russian Roulette effect: what works for a society as a whole may not work for individual users.
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 chances of infecting someone in five encounters is very small. If you know the person has AIDS you will also use virucides and other means which will further reduce transmission even if the condom fails.
Condoms are not miraculously effective. They may not protect people who go around having sex with dozens of different partners per year nearly everyday. But such people are rare.
The only thing condom use does, even if everyone uses them all the time, is slow down the rate of infections per encounter.
If we could slow it down by a factor of 20 the disease would decrease exponentially, because people who are already infected will die off. Also, when they become very sick they no longer have sex often. And eventually they die of old age, obviously.
The other major infection path for AIDS is from mother to baby during birth. Fortunately, this has been largely eliminated, even in Africa, with antiviral drugs.
The overall process, the annual infection rate, is still exponential . . .
In the other direction!
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 . . .
Fortunately not. These medications drastically reduce the level of virus in the blood, which makes it safer for the sexual partner. When a person who is infected takes all medications and uses a condom and a virucide, the risk of infection is greatly reduced. (Irresponsible infected people who do not take medications die off, even in the U.S.)
The downside is that disease carriers do live longer which gives them more opportunity to spread the disease.
Since the annual infection rate remains exponential with or without
condoms . . .
This is incorrect, as I said.
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.
This is absolutely, positively incorrect, based on simple mathematics. Run a spreadsheet with infections and deaths, and plug in a factor of 20 decrease in infection. Any disease will go extinct, unless it survives outside the body. I have never heard of an infectious disease so virulent it could survive such a massive reduction in the infection rate.
- Jed
