We only have a limited number of PhD's trying to figure out how to cure diseases. Aids has been worked on for years and nobody should be contacting it. We've spend billions of dollars trying to find a cure, but in the mean time, you have been told how not to catch it.
You are told that if you jump off a roof, you may break your leg. So you jump off and break your leg, now you complain.
We need to spend these resources on diseases which affect randomly. For example, my father has Parkensons and Alzhiemers, which he did not get via dirty needles are unsafe sex. He lived his life by the book and got these. Other people are afflicted with diseases, which are not their fault. These are the diseases which we need to find a cure. Aids is easy, don't share needles and don't have unsafe sex.

Let's get real-abstinance until marriage is unrealistic for almost ALL youth in a society where people who choose marriage/children marry at age 25-30. This being so, the vast majority of people will have many sex partners and therefore must accept a non-zero risk.

Controlling an epidemic is done not by trying to seal a few people off from it but rather by reducing the number of new cases per each infected person that the epidemic burns out. If each 11 people infected only infected 10 more, the epidemic dies out, If they infect 12, it spreads. This is a 20% difference meaning an epidemic instead of a cluster.

Condom use has slowed the epidemic, but government funding diversions to "abstinance only" have cut off many supplies of free condoms. This, in turn, has led to a massive rise in "barebacking" among Gay men-and no doubt among gay teens. Thanks to that, HIV is now also rising in that population.

Similarily, lack of needle exchange funding in DC has led to an out-of-control epidemic spreading to African-American women here. In fact, in DC white Gay men are a minority of new cases!

Let's get real-for ALL individuals to use condoms purchased themselves and not available except at a separate location EVERY time, and for ALL drug addicts to use a clean needle obtained themselves without assistance will NEVER, EVER happen! If you want people to use condoms, they need to be pervasively available. If you want IV drug users to use clean needles, you must make them pervasively available as well. Otherwise be prepared to spend more money on AIDS meds later!

On top of all else, so many people are dissatisfied with the amount of "feel" through many condoms that are being distributed today that they give up on condom use altogether. With vaccine studies failing and drugs unable to remove HIV altogether, some research money ought to go into developing better condoms that people would be more willing to use. It would cost a lot less to develop new kinds of condoms that would be useable even by men with "performance difficulties" and not cost sensation than it is to develop new AIDS meds!

As it srtands now, when someone does come up with a better condom(say, the Viton ones), they get little publicity and opposition from anti-birth control pharmacists, and their products often are so poorly promoted as to nearly disappear.

In addition, education to counter growing pro-barebacking cultural influences(from bareback porn to Church opposition to birth control)would be money well spent.

Given the realities of the street and culture, we need to focus our efforts on stopping brush-fire epidemics like in DC(fed by dirty needles) and Africa(fed by interaction with malaria). We will never, ever wipe out HIV by prevention, but we CAN limit it to an endemic disease that some people get,most don't instead of a sequence of raging epidemics.

This requires encouraging people in high risk groups to never, ever have unprotected sex with people in low risk groups, even in unprotected sex in both groups remains common!

In addition, we need to ensure that young people always insist on condom use with anyone they have not known since childhood so as to keep older partners of youth from setting into motion clusters of cases that strike youth before they can decide how much risk they are willing to bear.

Think of different social groups that have limited sexual/blood interaction as like watertight compartments on a ship in a battle zone. Keeping watertight doors BETWEEN these compartments tightly shut keeps the whole ship from sinking. You cannot keep every compartment dry when the ship is hit, but you can most certainly keep it afloat!

There are always going to be groups in any society that are risk-tolerant and not likely to be deterred from anything by HIV. Unless protection is pervasive and does not carry any form of deterrent to use, it's use will diminish with time as we've seen in the Gay comunity. If this is kept out of youth culture it will delay the age at which people who get HIV are infected.

When HIV first came to the US, it got into Gay men by chance. Since Gay-culture Bi men(like myself) tend to have only casual sex(not relationships) with straight women, condom use in those pairings has always been relatively high(for birth control reasons). As a result, the Gay community contained it for years, receiving no credit for doing so. It got out, not by Bi men or even men "on the down low" with opposite-sex relationships, but by shared IV drug needles.

Once it got into IV drug users, it was just a matter of time before it got into straight sex workers and spread out from there. You can thank Nacny Reagan's "just say no" apporach to drugs for that one! Remember, it was in the 1980's that a lot of drug parahenalia laws were tightened.

In other words, the needle laws worked like a saboteur on a battleship opening a watertight door between the Gay community(one compartment) and women sex workers(another compartment).