A few weeks back I posted on what I perceived to be an incorrect suggestion in a Washington Post editorial on the position of Pope Benedict with respect to condom use in Africa and his contention “You can’t resolve [the AIDS epidemic] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.” At the time, I said that surely the Pope’s claim was that condoms lead to an increased frequency of sex and that increased sex led to an increase in AIDs. So the claim was a hypothesis subject to testing: does the increased-sex effect of condom use outweigh the safety benefits of using condoms.
Michael Webb of Balliol College has now followed up and done an extensive set of interviews with experts in public health to test Pope Benedict’s assertion and they are posted on a website called The Alligator.
Webb describes the controversy that the Pope’s statement provoked:
Delivered to a continent where 22 million people live with HIV, and which accounted for 75% of all AIDS deaths in 2007, his words provoked strong reactions. Journalists, politicians and AIDS activists from around the world lined up to criticise the Pope