Madam, — Dick Cremins SJ (February 12th) is right to challenge David Adams’s simplistic view that the Catholic Church’s position on condom use has led to the death of millions.
However Fr Cremins’s statistical gymnastics on condom effectiveness could lead readers to have a false idea of their role in HIV prevention. He implies that HIV transmission is virtually inevitable with condom use over the course of a year.
His first statistical mistake is that he fails to distinguish between consistent and correct use of condoms and what is called “typical use”. The latter is due to the failure not of the condom but of the participants to follow the product’s instructions correctly and leads to between 10 and 15 out of 100 women becoming pregnant in a year. With consistent and correct use this figure is approximately two out of 100 women per year.
Secondly, he states that “a normal woman can become pregnant during only 24 hours in every four weeks. She can get HIV 24 hours a day. So the risk of relying on a condom to avoid HIV is about 25 times greater”, This is completely untrue and fails to take account of the transmissibility of HIV, which is very low compared with the likelihood of pregnancy and indeed much lower than the transmissibility of most other sexually transmitted infections. He ignores factors such as the viral load of the HIV positive person, their adherence to medication, the sex of the person intending to avoid transmission, the presence of other infections and the type of sex being performed.
Having a false view of transmission only adds to the stigma which people living with HIV (including many church leaders) experience. Manipulating statistics to justify or condemn a moral position is ultimately self-defeating and impedes the development of an effective response to the pandemic in which all parties, including churches, must play their part. – Yours, etc,