Wall Street Journal - July 14, 2004

Jacques Chirac demonstrated how little one Frenchman knows about sex when he effectively blamed the AIDS epidemic on American drug companies. In a statement read at the meeting, the French President accused the U.S. of bullying poor countries into ceding rights to make cheap generic anti-AIDS drugs. A U.S. official properly responded by calling his remarks "nonsense."

Meanwhile, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan bemoaned the lack of U.S. "leadership" on AIDS. Washington is so busy fighting the war on terror, he told the BBC, that it is not paying enough attention to combating AIDS. Weapons of mass destruction have "the potential to kill thousands," he said, while AIDS "is killing millions."

Set aside the moral repugnance of equating a health crisis with the man-made massacre of innocents. Mr. Annan is perhaps miffed that the record sum the Bush Administration is spending on combating AIDS is not all funneled through the organization he leads. Expenditures are closely controlled and must meet well-defined American standards.

Which brings us to another speaker in Bangkok this week: Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni. Mr. Bush's $15 billion AIDS initiative, 20% of which is allocated to prevention, is inspired in part by Uganda's success in fighting the disease.

Here's what Mr. Museveni told the conference Monday, in explaining his now-famous ABC strategy: "Abstain from sex or delay having sex if you are young and not married, Be faithful to your sexual partner (zero-grazing), after testing, or use a Condom properly and consistently if you are going to move around."

Merely to suggest a solution to HIV infection that does not put condoms as the first and only line of defense challenges the U.N., the World Health Organization and the various NGOs. To advise self-control as part of the solution is, moreover, to imply that individual decisions about sex and drug use are partly responsible for the spread of AIDS -- a connection that AIDS activists have resisted from the start of this plague.

In Bangkok, Mr. Museveni repeated two home truths. First is that condoms have a failure rate. Even the pro-condom WHO says that "consistent and correct" condom use reduces infection only by 90%. The second is that condoms can encourage promiscuity, the behavior that is at the heart of the sexually transmitted epidemic. So while the activists insist on condoms for supposedly non-infectious sexual trysts, the Ugandan speaks of love and commitment.

The best way to fight AIDS, Mr. Museveni told an audience that grew more stunned by the minute, is with "relationships based on love and trust, instead of institutionalized mistrust, which is what the condom is all about." While the rest of sub-Saharan Africa is ever more mired in AIDS, Uganda has gone from a 30% infection rate in the early 1990s to 6% today, a success rate the president attributes to abstinence. He's already saved more lives than Messrs. Annan and Chirac ever will.

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