ByzCath:
Virtually nil is not a scientific term and any scientific study that has that term in it is suspect.
Virtually nil is my term, fear not. The actual conclusions were in numbers like the ones quoted above.
Virtually nil does not mean zero. It means that there is a chance. Do you want to explain to the person who is “lucky” enough to have it happen to him?
In the year 2000, 41,821 people were killed in car accidents in the USA. I’m going to keep driving anyway.
It is true that condoms do not make it impossible to catch AIDS. They do, however, reduce the chance of it by a factor of around 10,000.
This is still not as good as abstinence. It is, however, a far sight from “Condoms don’t stop HIV!” which is what Trujillo is trying to argue. Using dishonest claims based on medical studies which concluded the opposite of what he claims they did.
Here is the information I promised in my first reply.
In 1992 there was a letter in the Washington Times and this letter was written in response to it. It was written by the Editor of the Rubber Chemistry and Technology, a trade journal for the rubber industry.
Here is that letter…
No one denies that there are microscopic holes in condoms. However, what people forget is that viruses can’t just leap through those holes. They need to be carried in a fluid medium. And latex condoms stop that fluid medium from leaving.
This isn’t abstract theory. A whole bunch of scientists have checked this a whole bunch of times, in a whole bunch of ways, and every time they find that condoms have an extraordinarily high success rate at stopping HIV.
If the Catholic Church thinks using them is a sin, fine. That’s the Church’s prerogative, and if someone’s willing to stop using it for that reason, more power to them.
Trying to convince everyone else to stop by lying about the science is a different story. And in a part of the world being decimated by an AIDS pandemic, it’s unconscionable.
Most, if not all, studies on HIV have been politicized. If you do not get the answers they want then you do not recieve funding. This is a major problem with the grant for research model.
Is this a justification for lying about the results of the studies that have been done?
I worked in the health care field, HIV was one of the reasons I got out. Are you aware that if a person is infected with HIV and that person has no “known” risk factors that the CDC assumes the person is lieing.
I wasn’t aware of this. How often does that happen, out of curiosity?
The HIV virus is found alive in slavia and tears. No one knows how much of the virus one must get before they become infected.
These are just some of the troubling things about HIV and what we do not know about.
I have a hard time believing we still know so little about the HIV virus. Maybe years ago, but these days we know so much about it that the first step of AIDS treatment is to genetically sequence your virus to determine its individual mutations and then offer a treating regimen tailored to your specific virus. There’s promising research being done into genetically engineering a strain of the HIV virus that attacks only cancer cells. We know a lot more about this disease than we did even five years ago.
Rather than attacking the Church and its stand we need to look at the truth. The only way to stop the spread of HIV is to live as the Church Teaches.
Right, but you do realize that’s never going to happen, yes? Lots and lots of people are not Catholic. They don’t care whether the Church thinks contraception is a sin, and they’re going to keep on having sex. If they have that sex unprotected, they have a much greater chance of catching diseases.
Trying to use deception to keep them from using protection, especially in an area of the world so devastated by AIDS, is horrifying.
