-----Original Message-----
From: IHP-owner@... [mailto:IHP-owner@...] On
Behalf Of Mary Anne Mercer
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 7:49 AM
To: International Health
Subject: HIV for Comment (fwd)


We are fortunate in this country to have a range of venues for
expressing
our opinions on currently important topics. The message below describes
a
current issue in our national HIV policy arena, and provides a very
simple
way to express an opinion on it. Just click on 'submit your comments'
on the menu at the left of the web site provided below.

Mary Anne

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: HIV for Comment

This is a frightening new development...

The CDC is accepting public comment at HIVComments@... through
August
16 re: the new plan to reduce/eliminate funding of ALL programs on
HIV-prevention education that simply include information on condom use -
regardless of whether the information or materials were paid for with
private or federal dollars. This is similar to the "global gag rule"
used
on women's health and family-planning clinics that even mention
abortion.

Please email and let them know that abstinence-only programs actually
increase the risk of contracting HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted
diseases. This is REALLY IMPORTANT!!! Forward this to interested parties
and please respond with your comment to the CDC. If you have listservs
or
websites, please post! Comments are acceptable from individuals and
contractors/programs. (Below read an article from the LA Weekly.)

The Centers for Disease Control has always been about science. Please
don't
allow political pressures and religious morals to cloud the issues.
Condoms
work. There have been only 1,496 comments to date from across the entire
USA about this critical issue. View them at
http://www.cdc.gov/nchstp/od/content_guidelines/submitted_comments.htm

Feel free to cut-and-paste from above, or send your own comments, but
let's
defeat this dangerous proposal - please, SAY SOMETHING!

>--------------------------------------------------------LA Weekly
Article----------------------------------------------
Condom Wars: New guidelines gut HIV prevention -- and endanger young
people's lives
by Doug Ireland www.dissidentvoice.org June 27, 2004 First Published in
the
LA Weekly

Lethal new regulations from President Bush's Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, quietly issued with no fanfare last
week,
complete the right-wing Republicans' goal of gutting HIV-prevention
education in the United States. In place of effective,
disease-preventing
safe-sex education, little will soon remain except failed programs that
denounce condom use, while teaching abstinence as the only way to
prevent
the spread of AIDS. And those abstinence-only programs, researchers say,
actually increase the risk of contracting AIDS and other sexually
transmitted diseases (STDs).

Published on June 16 in the Federal Register, the censorious new CDC
guidelines will be mandatory for any organization that does
HIV-prevention
work and also receives federal funds -- whether or not any federal money
is
directly spent on their programs designed to fight the spread of the
epidemic. (The CDC is the principal federal funder of prevention
education
about HIV and AIDS, and its head a Bush appointee). It's all couched in
arcane bureaucratese, but this is the Bush administration's Big Stick -
do
exactly as we say, or lose your federal funding. And nearly all of the
some
3,800 AIDS service organizations (ASOs) that do the bulk of
HIV-prevention
education receive at least part of their budget from federal dollars.
Without that money, they'd have to slash programs or even close their
doors.

These new regs require the censoring of any "content" -- including
"pamphlets, brochures, fliers, curricula," "audiovisual materials" and
"pictorials (for example, posters and similar educational materials
using
photographs, slides, drawings or paintings)," as well as "advertising"
and
Web-based info. They require all such "content" to eliminate anything
even
vaguely "sexually suggestive" or "obscene"-- like teaching how to use a
condom correctly by putting it on a dildo, or even a cucumber. And they
demand that all such materials include information on the "lack of
effectiveness of condom use" in preventing the spread of HIV and other
STDs
-- in other words, the Bush administration wants AIDS fighters to tell
people: Condoms don't work. This demented exigency flies in the face of
every competent medical body's judgment that, in the absence of an
HIV-preventing vaccine, the condom is the single most effective tool
available to protect someone from getting or spreading the AIDS virus.

Moreover, the CDC will now take the decisions on which AIDS-fighting
educational materials actually work away from those on the frontlines of
the combat against the epidemic, and hand them over to political
appointees.
>
This is done by requiring that Policy Review Panels, which each group
engaged in HIV prevention must have, can no longer be appointed by that
group but must instead be named by state and local health departments.
And
those panels must then take a vote on every single flier or brochure or
other "content" before it is issued.

This means that, under the new regs, political appointees will have a
veto
and be able to ban anything in those educational materials they deem
"obscene" or lacking in anti-condom propaganda. With Republicans
controlling a majority of statehouses, and having handed over control of
the health departments to folks deemed acceptable to the Christian right
and cultural conservatives in many Southern and Midwestern states -- and
the rest of public-health departments notoriously subservient to
political
pressure from the state and local legislatures that control their
appropriations -- anti-condom junk science that plays politics with
people's lives will rule the day.

Under the new regs, it will be impossible even to track the spread of
unsafe sexual practices -- because the CDC's politically inspired
censorship includes "questionnaires and survey materials" and thus would
forbid asking people if they engage in specific sexual acts without
protection against HIV. For that too would be "obscene." (Questions
about
gay kids have already disappeared from the CDC's national Youth Risk
Survey
after Christian-right pressure).

So what will be left? Why, the abstinence-only ed programs dear to
Bush's
heart and to the Christian right. A third of all federal HIV-education
money -- some $270 million more in Bush's latest budget -- now goes to
abstinence-only programs, almost universally to Christian groups as part
of
Bush's "faith-based initiatives" (no Jewish or Muslim groups receive any
funds). This is a brilliant maneuver -- Bush has turned money earmarked
for
fighting AIDS into political pork for his Christer base. Much of this
money
goes to anti-abortion groups masquerading as "women's health" or
"crisis-pregnancy" centers. Others receiving such funds engage in
religious
propaganda -- a federal judge found that Louisiana's federally funded
Governor's Program on Abstinence illegally handed out Bibles, staged
anti-abortion prayer rallies outside women's clinics, and had students
perform Bible-based skits.

Yet Bush's Health and Human Services Department refused demands to audit
the Louisiana program, while at the same time conducting repeated
harassing
audits of effective AIDS-fighting groups that have vigorously protested
Bush policies on AIDS, like New York's Gay Men's Health Crisis and San
Francisco's Stop AIDS Project. (The latter lost its federal funding
earlier
this year for sex-ed thought crimes similar to those banned in the new
CDC
regs -- a pre-emptive warning to all other ASOs to toe the Bush-Christer
line -- and subsequently got a $100 contribution from former Bush AIDS
czar
Scott Evertz, ousted by Bush's theocrats, to help continue what he
called
Stop AIDS's "good work").

Teaching about condoms doesn't increase sexual activity and certainly
doesn't increase unprotected sex, but abstinence-only ed does both. For
example, a Minnesota Department of Health study of the state's
five-year,
abstinence-only program found last year that sexual activity by students
taking the program actually doubled, from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent.

Even more alarming, a study by Columbia University Department of
Sociology
chairman Peter Bearman of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents from 12 to
18
years old over a five-year period found unsafe sex much greater among
youth
who'd signed pledges to abstain from sex until (heterosexual) marriage
(a
key component of most abstinence only-based education programs, which
leave
gay kids, who can't get married in 49 states, to face a lifetime of
chastity).

The Columbia study, released last March and financed in part by the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, showed that
while
59 percent of teenage males who did not pledge abstinence used a condom
during sex, only 40 percent of abstinence-pledging boys used a condom.
As
Bearman told The New York Times, telling teens "to 'just say no,'
without
understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to
create
greater risk" of HIV and other STDs. In his study, 88 percent of those
who'd pledged chastity reported having sex before marriage. The large
Bearman study confirms one published in the American Journal of
Sociology
in 2001, which showed that pent-up sexual desire and failure to realize
risk exposure among students in abstinence-only programs made them a
third
less likely to use condoms than others, even if, on average, they began
having sex a year and half later.

All those numbers help explain why the new CDC regs are causing outrage
and
anguish among leaders in the AIDS community. "Kids are being taught that
condoms don't work, while real life-saving HIV education is being
eviscerated across the board," fumes Sean Strub, founder of POZ, the
magazine for the HIV-positive community. And, Strub points out, the Bush
administration has hamstrung AIDS organizations, "which are faced with
the
terrible choice of prioritizing care for existing HIV-positive clients
over
speaking out against the new CDC rules and risking losing their federal
funding."

There's only a tiny window of opportunity to try to get the new CDC
censorship rules changed before they go into effect (the deadline for
public comments is August 16 -- they may be e-mailed to
HIVComments@...
or faxed to 404-639-3125.) But when the regs begin to be felt, just
watch
already-rising AIDS infection rates really soar.

Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator whose
articles appear regularly in The Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These
Times
among many others. This article first appeared in the LA Weekly.



"May I travel not so fast today that I fail to help someone along the
way."