The Pill’s deadly affair with HIV/AIDS
Interesting. Verrrrrrrrry interesting. It only makes sense that there would be consequences to putting foreign chemically junk in your body, right?
Why does HIV/AIDS strike more women than men globally? Why is sub-Saharan Africa the home of the world’s largest heterosexual HIV/Aids epidemic? Why does Thailand have an HIV infection rate of over one-in-100 adults, while Japan’s rate is 0.01 per cent and the Philippines’ 0.02 per cent? One answer to these questions can be found in an article published this week by the Population Research Institute deeply implicating hormonal contraception in the AIDS epidemic.
Joan Claire Robinson’s resume of a larger report yet to be published shows that evidence has been piling up for two decades. She writes:
More than 50 medical studies, to date, have investigated the association of hormonal contraceptive use and HIV/AIDS infection. The studies show that hormonal contraceptives—the oral pill and Depo-Provera—increase almost all known risk factors for HIV, from upping a woman’s risk of infection, to increasing the replication of the HIV virus, to speeding the debilitating and deadly progression of the disease.
A medical trial published in the journal AIDS in 2009—monitoring HIV progression by the need for antiretroviral drugs (ART)—saw “the risk of becoming eligible for ART was almost 70% higher in women taking the pills and more than 50% higher in women using DMPA [Depo-Provera] than in women using IUDS.”
Given that more than 100 million women worldwide use hormonal contraception, and that population control agencies and advocates insist that contraception is basic to the progress of developing countries, this is a very big problem.
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As someone with a degree in epidemiology, I can assert firmly that this is not true. There is no causal link between oral contraception and HIV. The reason so many sub-Saharan African women get HIV is because they are discouraged from using condoms and are routinely beaten by their husbands should they request them, despite the African version of “machismo” allowing men free reign to have sex with prostitutes.
Gee Sarah, it sounds as though the research about to be published contradicts what you just said. This report purports to show that there is indeed a correlation between a woman taking hormone-based contractives and her vulnerability to the HIV virus, how quickly it turns into full-blown aids, and how readily it is transmitted. That, anyway, is what I read in the article. Of course, we’ll have to see the study, but still, that seems to be what it says. I agree that one never knows the bias of a study until one reads it, but your answer simply rejecting such a possibility and blaming the lack of condom use as the main contributing factor in the spread of HIV in Africa was just a little, well, unscientific. I do think this raises interesting questions anyway. Even if this is the case, I’m not sure exactly what kind of changes in HIV-prevention education would result. In other words, would the idea be to tell women to get tested more often if they’re on the pill, or to tell men to be more worried about getting HIV themselves and use condoms if they are sleeping with women who are on the pill? I don’t know, but again, these are interesting questions.