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Rights group blasts Uganda's approach to preventing AIDS

A US-based human rights group accused the Ugandan government Monday of making a worrying shift toward promoting abstinence in the fight against AIDS and minimizing efforts to promote the use of condoms. Ugandan officials and church leaders said the report was seriously flawed and lacked any factual basis.

Human Rights Watch accused President Yoweri Museveni and his wife, Janet Museveni, of falling under the influence of US Christian conservatives and placing millions of young Ugandans at risk of contracting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Museveni and the Ugandan government have been widely praised for making Uganda one of the few countries to lower its HIV infection rate, from 15 percent in 1992 to 6 percent in 2002. More than one million Ugandans are infected with HIV and a million more have died since 1982. That success is at risk because Uganda is adopting an abstinence-until-marriage program first created in the US, Human Rights Watch said in a report yesterday.

"The effect of Uganda's new direction in HIV prevention is thus to replace existing, sound public health strategies with unproven and potentially life-threatening messages, impeding the realization of the human right to information, to the highest attainable standard of health, and to life," the report said. "The policy in fact undermines condoms as an HIV prevention measure."

Museveni's spokesman said although abstinence is an African as well as Christian tradition, the president was committed to existing methods of controlling AIDS using different approaches.

Onapito Ekomoloit said "The president and the first lady said those who are sexually active should be faithful to their partners, that others should abstain and those who cannot abstain should use condoms."

Dr. Alex Opio, the assistant commissioner for National Diseases Control, said "There has been no change. Human Rights Watch may be depending on hearsay."
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