The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta quietly published new regulations concerning what Federally-funded organizations doing HIV-prevention work may say and do, and the rules run counter to virtually everything known about preventing AIDS. This LA Weekly article has more:
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 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.
Perhaps, in his haste to emulate Reagan, Bush is attempting to ensure AIDS is once again the health crisis it was when the Gipper shuffled out of office. Yes, that’s inflammatory, but in cases like this, what are we to think? It gets worse:
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: No condom message, and also no information gathering for public health purposes. I’m sure this is going to work out just fine. It’s not as those there’s not already ample science behind the efficacy of condoms in the face of HIV, and never mind what a bunch of virgin priests want you to think.
READ THIS ARTICLE. The agenda of this Administration is absolutely contrary to all good epidemiological science where HIV/AIDS is concerned, and they’re doing their very best to make sure all the good science gets quashed. The human cost doesn’t matter to these people; all they’re concerned about is ideological purity.
There’s a fax number and an email address at the end of the article. These new regs are in a period of public comment; let them know how wrong this is, and that it’s time to stop letting the Christian Right determine science policy. Let them hear you now, and make sure you let them hear you in November.
More: This October 2003 Salon story covers the trevails of Advocates for Youth, a national nonprofit that provides comprehensive sex education information. AfY was audited three times in a year by the Bush administration; they contend the reason is that they’re openly contemptuous of abstinence-only programs. AfY is not alone. Again, we have an administration here that is using ideology to try and trump science. Check your history books for what happens when leaders try this particular plan.