Another secular expert backs pope on condoms in Africa

A French epidemiologist, René Ecochard, backs the pope's assessment of the efficacy of condom campaigns in countries with large cases of AIDS. He said that the condom issue has become a "prisoner of ideology" and there is a "lack of realism". "All epidemiologists agree today that the campaigns to distribute [condoms] in countries where the proportion of affected people is very high, do not work," he says. The problem is, condoms fail often enough that in places where 25% of the population are infected, it simply doesn't work.