Dear editor,

``I would say that this problem of AIDS cannot be overcome with advertising slogans. If the soul is lacking, if Africans do not help one another, the scourge cannot be resolved by distributing condoms; quite the contrary, we risk worsening the problem," said Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to Cameroon.

Learned and wise people, specialists in analyzing the deadly plague that is HIV/AIDS, have jumped to the Pope and have vowed that his judgment is sound.

One of them is Dr. Edward C. Green, the director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at Harvard University, who told the Catholic News Agency that condoms are actually ``exacerbating the problem" in Africa.

The Harvard scientist noted that when the AIDS epidemic hit the African continent, the condom ``industry" began to use the spread of the disease to unfurl its marketing strategy while seeking subsidies for the production and delivery of condoms. Business had come for the death of potential human beings.

The process in Uganda is very clear to Green: there people are taught not to be promiscuous. That small country has been able to stem its AIDS infection rate by two-thirds because it promoted abstinence before marriage and fidelity thereafter.

Green revealed that it is two African countries, Swaziland and Botswana, which have the highest infection rates in the world but have begun campaigns to promote fidelity and monogamy.

However, Green is not the only researcher who came to the Pope's defense. Among them is Dr. Norman Hearst, an epidemiologist at the University of California at San Francisco, who was chosen by the U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS to undertake a scientific review to confirm if condoms had stemmed the advance of the virus.

He found, to the contrary, that it was those regions with the greatest number of condoms per person which have the greatest number of cases of this cruel scourge.

Clemente Ferrer is the president of the European Institute of Marketing, Communications and Publicity.
clementeferrer@yahoo.es