HIV prevention

I was reading an article about a new gel that’s to be used for the prevention of AIDS. They think that it is about 60% effective. As I was reading the article I was becoming more and more horrified because they went on to say that some of the women would be receiving a placebo! But, as I read on, they said that they also told the women to continue using condoms, and so the test is really to measure the added protection of using the gel. However, they also said that many of these women would probably not actually end up using a condom too. So, how can they really measure the effectiveness of this gel, if some women are using it with a condom and some are not, and are they picking out women that have partners that have HIV? Also, are they all the same amount sexually active? I don’t understand how this test is going to work. Plus, if a condom is used effectively then it should reduce a person’s risk of getting HIV to less than 1%. So, there’s another variable. Do all these women understand how to properly use a condom? I’m happy that another option is becoming available to women that have sex partners that refuse to use a condom, but I just don’t understand how they are really going to know how effective the gel actually is. I guess that even if it is only a little bit effective, that using it is better than using nothing. I just hope that people who once used condoms will not stop now that a gel is available. They did say that by the year 2012 there should be a gel available that’s up to 90% effective; so, that’s good, but can you imagine having sex knowing that there was a 10% chance that your protection wouldn’t work. By the way, this is being developed with women in Africa in mind. That’s where the largest population of AIDS patients is, and the men there don’t like to use condoms. So, some people might be saying that the women just shouldn’t be having sex, and then they wouldn’t get AIDS, but that’s not the case. Many of these women are faithful to their husbands, but the problem is that their husbands are not faithful to them. This is why it is so important to come up with an alternative to a condom.

Here’s the article: “Large-scale tests of AIDS-prevention gel begin”
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/10/28/africa.aids.ap/index.html