Condoms and the church: a well-intentioned but deadly myth

We can stop the spread of HIV overnight. We can do it tonight, in fact. A complete, dead stop. Zero new infections.

All we have to do is convince everyone to give up extramarital sex and injection drugs.

Regrettably, it's undoubtedly harder to dissuade the peoples of the world from engaging in random acts of body-fluid-sharing than it is to invent and distribute vaccines to cure blood-borne infections. Unless we convert the world to fundamentalist Islam, abstinence doesn't sell. (Say what you will about the Taliban; all-Muslim Afghanistan had a 0.01 percent HIV infection rate in 2001, ditto Saudi Arabia. Contrast this with non-Muslim Botswana, where nearly 40 percent of the populace is infected.)

Abstinence doesn't sell even when it's pitched as the global-AIDS panacea.

Why? Most injection-drug users are often nothing short of hopelessly addicted. Most third-world prostitutes aren't in the profession for the thrills, but because they have few viable alternatives. And there are a lot of people in the world who simply aren't good at the whole choose-monogamy-or-chastity thing. They are the weak link in any plan that depends on self-enforced chastity in order to work. Last I checked, those people numbered in the billions.

Such is human nature.

The Church of Rome, despite scandals old and new, remains a genuine force for good in this world. Unfortunately, the outrage-to-benignity-ratio meter took a major swing in the wrong direction on Oct. 10 when Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the official arbiter of Church's stance on family issues, revived an old, deadly Catholic canard in a BBC broadcast: Namely, that condoms don't block the spread of HIV.

This author remembers hearing the same story from a Catholic-school-educated fellow over dinner several years ago. He was quite convinced that condoms were of no use in preventing HIV: The virus would slip right through the latex.

At the time, it hadn't occurred to me to ask whether he'd ever filled up a condom with water.

You see, if you fill a condom with room-temperature water (make it too cold and you'll get condensation), it won't drip out. Go ahead, try it. Water molecules are too large to pass through latex. (Manufacturers actually use a similar technique to test their condoms.)

Now, let's say that you filled the same condom with a suspension of HIV virus particles in water. Keep in mind that whereas a molecule of water consists of three atoms (two of which are tiny hydrogens), a single ribose sugar (a backbone link in the virus's RNA genome) alone consists of 20 atoms. There are over 9000 of these 20-atom RNA backbone links in the HIV genome. Each of these is attached to a nucleotide. The entire chain of nucleotides is in turn wrapped in a protein shell.

With this in mind, do any HIV particles leak out?

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Both the World Health Organization (which understandably criticized the Cardinal's speech) and the Church would prefer a world without HIV. But the Church's opposition to all forms of artificial contraception is, unfortunately, contributing to the spread of the virus. I'm tempted to repeat an aphorism about good intentions here.

In fairness to Cardinal Trujillo, condoms are not a panacea. The WHO acknowledges a 10-15 percent failure rate (which is generally attributed to "breakage or slippage," not micropores). But in midst of a global AIDS epidemic inflamed in no small part by widespread non-use of prophylactics, that the Church would grandstand for abstinence (which might not be a bad idea) by promulgating the myth that condoms can't stop HIV is not merely old-fashioned. When local Catholic officials persuade the AIDS-vulnerable (especially youths, who will often take any excuse to stop wearing them) that condoms provide no protection, it's positively lethal.

Indeed, if the Vatican would rather promote a pro-abstinence policy, and exhort (for instance) Indian prostitutes to eschew condoms, perhaps the Church could give them jobs that did not involve having sex with AIDS-infected truck drivers.

Joseph Barillari is a computer science major from North Canton, Ohio.