Pope versus the epidemiologist re AIDS

Driven to sarcasm by Pope Benedict XVI’s pronouncement that condoms “can even increase the problem” of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani wrote for the London Times:

I’ve worked with HIV prevention data for more than a decade, and I have found nothing to support this except a claim by William Bennett, a former Secretary of Education in the Reagan Administration, who once pointed out that condom use was higher in communities with higher HIV prevalence – clear evidence that condoms aggravate the epidemic. Similarly, more people use treated bed nets in Lagos than in London, and Nigeria has far more malaria than the UK – clear evidence that bed nets spread malaria.

She finds “great mystery” in what she sees as the Pope’s focus on compassion for HIV victims at the expense of the uninfected, a view “shared by many evangelicals.” Instead:

Why can’t we also show compassion to uninfected people by helping them to stay that way, using every effective tool at our disposal? That includes abstinence, which works for many Catholic priests and some teenagers. And cutting down the number of people you have sex with. And condoms.