US abstinence campaign bashed

The US came under attack on Tuesday for tying millions of dollars to its policy of teaching sexual abstinence in poor nations, which senior UN officials say is causing more harm than good.

Although the UN special envoy on AIDS for Africa, Stephen Lewis, commended some of the successes of President George W. Bush's US$15 billion global AIDS intervention, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), he said its ideologically driven policies were unrealistic in male-dominated cultures where women were powerless to refuse sex or negotiate safer sex.

PEPFAR was launched in 2003 to address the impact of AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean, but one of its most controversial aspects has been a provision that at least 33 percent of prevention funding be earmarked for programmes encouraging abstinence until marriage.

"No government in the western world has the right to dictate policy to African governments on the way they structure their response to the pandemic. That kind of incipient neo-colonialism is simply unacceptable," Lewis said at the 16th International AIDS Conference, in Toronto, Canada.