This week’s World Conference on HIV/AIDS, meeting in Vienna, has heard what some consider may be good news.

Research in South Africa seems to suggest that a gel containing an anti-AIDS drug may halve infection rates when used before and after “unprotected” sex.

United Nations AIDS program chief scientific adviser, Dr Catherine Hankins, describes this report as “exciting”.

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Certainly a bit of good news on the HIV/AIDS scene would be welcome.

Here in Australia new AIDS cases per year doubled in the ten years 1997 to 2007 – and University of NSW researchers have predicted a further rise of 70 percent in the next few years. 

It seems that the more we focus on trying to develop technological fixes — gadgets, vaccines, and now this gel — the worse things get.

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Everyone says that education must be the key to curbing AIDS.

But what is to be the content? What are we to teach at-risk people?

The answers must include the following:

* teach them that sex with multiple partners is out, because it is flirting with death.

* and that anal sex is out, because it spreads HIV/AIDS so efficiently.

* and that relying primarily on condoms is out. It doesn’t work. Its illusion of being “protected” encourages people into increased disease-spreading behaviours.

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Those few African nations that have had some success in reducing HIV-infection rates — Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe — have made their central message “partner reduction”, i.e. faithfulness to husband or wife.

Nearby condom-promoting nations — South Africa itself being a tragic example — have high and un-improving infection rates.

Many people don’t like being told to improve their behaviour, even if it might save lives.

Presumably there are rich condom-manufacturing corporations able to influence policies in the world of HIV/AIDS politics.

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Yet isn’t behavior-modification basic to a common-sense approach to every serious problem that exists in the world?

Just think . . . .

If a government focused its anti-obesity campaign on weight-loss pills — never mentioning eating-reduction — what would we call them?

Crazy, perhaps?