Letters

Safe-sex?

Jack Blair

Contents - Feb 2007 - Buy a copy now Editorial: The Church and globalisation - Peter Westmore Education: Australia's Catholic school systems: the case for radical surgery - Michael Gilchrist News: The Church Around the World East Timor: priests threatened with execution - Peter Westmore Fr John Speekman: Vatican orders reinstatement of wrongly removed Sale Diocese parish priest - Michael Gilchrist Priesthood: Orthodox priests in a divided Church - Fr John Trigilio The Church and the environment: address the moral pollution first - Wanda Skowronska Salesians help rebuild post-tsunami Sri Lanka - Br Michael Lynch Why we need holy days of obligation - Joanna Bogle Music: Johann Sebastian Bach and the heavenly choir - Fr Finbarr Flanagan Letters: Shared guilt - Errol Duke Letters: Lost! - Moya and Leo Morrissey Letters: Truth and love - Chris Hilder Letters: Root Cause - Marie Kennedy Letters: Safe-sex? - Jack Blair Poetry: Gender-Bender Autos - Bruce Dawe Letters: Limbo? - Lawrence R. Hurley Letters: Manipulating language - Carol V. Phillips Letters: Obedience - Matthew Buckley Letters: Latin Mass - John Gariano Letters: Religious materials - J.W. Smith Letters: Catholic dolls - Anne Cramer Books: TREASURE IN CLAY: The Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen - Michael Gilchrist (reviewer) Books: BEGINNING AT JERUSALEM: Five Reflections on the History of the Church - Sr Mariana Handley (reviewer) Books: SPIRITUAL DIRECTION: Who Is It For and What Are Its Benefits? - Michael Gilchrist (reviewer) Books: B.A. Santamaria's correspondence published by MUP Books: New Titles from AD Books Reflection: Why the Church must continue to uphold priestly celibacy - Fr Pat Stratford

What crystal ball told Tony Sheehan (October AD2000) that condoms were 85 percent effective against HIV/AIDS? This is arrant nonsense.

Several years ago, 800 psychiatrists, psychologists and welfare professionals at a health conference on sexuality in the USA were asked by a guest speaker who would trust a condom during sex with an HIV-infected person. Not a single hand went up!

If health professionals don't trust condom safety, how could anyone? Sales talk and safer-sex propaganda are no substitute for empirical evidence.

Viruses are able to penetrate microscopic holes in latex that are too small to allow sperm cells or bacteria through. Dr Hamdy of the USA Drug and Food Administration stated: "The HIV virus is so small it is dwarfed by microscopic bacteria which, if they were the size of basketballs, the HIV virus would be about the size of the head of a pin".

L. Cusack stated in the February 1998 issue of AD2000 that the size of the HIV virus is 0.2 microns while latex void can be as much as 50 microns, i.e., 250 times the size of the HIV virus or, by comparison, a rabbit alongside an elephant.

Trust condoms? Never. They are neither safe nor safer against HIV/ AIDS. But propaganda will still try to convince the naüve.

JACK BLAIR
Glenhaven, NSW

Reprinted from AD2000 Vol 20 No 1 (February 2007), p. 14