From Entebbe, Uganda – “A man shocked parents on Sunday when he confessed to recruiting school children into homosexuality to promote the practice in Ugandan schools.”
Hence started the opening paragraph of a front page feature of the Ugandan daily The New Vision under a 5-cm letter header: “HOMOSEXUAL ADMITS RECRUITING STUDENTS”
New Vision’s Paul Kiwuuwa writes that George Oundo has received funding and training from “abroad” and targeted children, mostly “needy” ones, because children are “easy to initiate and they like easy things”. “Conversion” was achieved through books and compact disc …

From Entebbe, Uganda - The New Vision, a Uganda daily, reprinted today an article by Irish Times writer John Waters lambasting the Western media for pumping out its partisan propaganda about HIV prevention through the distribution of condoms.

The western media has been pumping out its partisan propaganda about prevention of AIDS
through the distribution of condoms (original caption)
Beyond taking the defence of the Pontiff’s unfounded claim that condoms aggravated the problem of HIV, Waters’s proposition is that “once you advocate condom use, you are accepting that abstinence is no longer a persuasive option”. Deliberate …

Africa and in particular sub-Saharan Africa is the continent the most affected by the HIV epidemic. During the last 25 years more than 20 millions people have died of AIDS in Africa. There, the epidemic particularly affects women, HIV transmission is mostly through heterosexual sex, and concurrent relationships have been identified as a force driving the spread of the virus in the population. In Africa, HIV is mostly about sex. Prevention interventions have been difficult, hindered by limited political commitment, if not political denial of the cause of AIDS, religious …

In a lengthy but rather well constructed and documented article published online in The East African, Curtis Abraham steers the charge against UNAIDS “for perpetuating the myth of condom effectiveness in Africa in the face of all evidence.”
Abraham rightly identifies that in a country like Uganda, the reduction in HIV incidence was not the result of condom-only prevention interventions (thanks to Helen Epstein for casting some light on the subject in her book “The Invisible Cure”) but was owning to behaviour changes and in particular partner-reduction campaigns such as that …

In Sizwe’s Test (originally entitled Three Letters Plague), author Jonny Steinberg recalled his deep feeling of shame associated with his first HIV test. Discussing his experience with a psychotherapist friend, she found an analogy with how pregnant women were prohibited to appear in public three or four generations ago as they would have been a huge source of shame.
“What was the root of that shame? What was it that had to be concealed? It is not the fact that she has sex. Everyone knows she has. It is the external …