A number of youth attending the AIDS 2006 conference have become critical of US former President Bill Clinton approach to relegate abstinence as an effective method of fighting HIV/AIDS.
The youth delegates who talked to Toronto youth media team were amused to the world’s leading HIV/AIDS activist to criticize abstinence yet had been proved as the best mode of protection addressed as the first priority by the ABC (Abstinence, Be faithful and Condoms) advocates.
Fred Musoke a Ugandan youth delegate said the youth had had enough of suffering with the virus and a sincere approach to its causes would be the foremost in such a conference with a theme “Time to Deliver.”
According to him Abstinence is one of the foremost important modes of HIV prevention but the mode needs support from policy makers to see that there is a social change in society.
He quotes Jim Yong Kim, head of the WHO’s HIV/Aids program, said in reference to the G8’s pledge to pump more money into getting wide spread access to anti-retroviral drugs that this is more to do with social change rather than administering better pharmaceuticals. “Treatment is not rocket science,” he said “prevention is rocket science”.
Musoke said that the uniqueness of HIV is in its transmission. It is a virus that must pass from person to person through the exchange of significant quantities of bodily fluids, primarily sexual fluid or blood.
These fluids do not ordinarily transfer from person to person except through the undertaking of specific activities over which an individual normally has control. The main methods of transmission amongst adults are via sexual intercourse or the sharing of needles that enter the blood stream of sequential individuals. The sharing of needles primarily occurs during the use of recreational drugs such as heroine.
“A safe assertion may be made that if a healthy adult avoids certain high risk activities, the probability of contracting HIV are miniscule. If two people of the opposite gender marry, and are faithful to each other for the rest of their lives, their risk of contracting HIV through sexual activity is negligible. HIV in children is usually transmitted during childbirth from an infected mother. There are various techniques that can be used to prevent this vertical spread. However, it is simple reality that if adults do not have HIV, children could not get it either,” he said.
The UN has reported that rates of HIV throughout the world are reaching previously unprecedented levels, estimated to be 40 million people infected worldwide. There were over 4 million new cases in the last year, 700 000 of which were in children. Current boom areas are Pakistan and Indonesia, where the report said that transmission was out of control, although the

Another youth delegate speaking on condition of anonymity said that leading HIV activists were shying away from advising people to avoid those behaviours likely to lead to HIV infection.
“They prefer to try to find ways to perform the various risky behaviours that they want to practice, but with a modicum of protection,” he said.
“Practically speaking this means the promotion of condom use, and the provision of clean needles and syringes to drug addicts so that they do not need to share and of latest the decampaigning of abstinence,”
He said that while condoms are believed to be protective and the provision of clean needles may well limit the risk of transmission, it is naïve to expect uneducated drug addicts to be responsible, and condoms do not provide full proof protection.
“If these are really the only preventative measures that can be offered, failure is assured and the virus will continue to spread. This is an issue that most people are starting to acknowledge.