PMC was recently featured in Earth Island Journal
http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/sex_sells/

Sex Sells: A Tiny Nonprofit Uses Mass Media to Encourage Family Planning

Fikrite is a girl in trouble. Her grandfather has just died and now a neighbor, a man named Damte, has taken over the house and is trying to turn the place into a bar and brothel. Fikrite says she won’t allow it, so Damte starts spreading rumors about the girl and soon everyone, including her boyfriend, thinks that she is hiding a child born out of wedlock. Damte then seduces Fikrite’s stepsister, Lamrot, gets her hooked on booze and drugs, and knocks her up. When Lamrot tries to abort the pregnancy, she almost bleeds to death and lands in the hospital, where she finds out that she is HIV-positive.

If this sounds like overcooked melodrama – well, that’s the point. The story comes from “Yeken Kignit” (“Looking Over One’s Life”), a radio soap opera that gripped much of Ethiopia for 257 episodes beginning in 2002. The show had all of the elements that make serial dramas popular: sex, romance, mischief, betrayal, suspense. But the wildly successful program – which reached more than one half of Ethiopian adults during its two-year run and sparked a craze for naming baby girls Fikrite – wasn’t designed just for entertainment. Produced by a small US organization called the Population Media Center (PMC), the show was written with the express purpose of encouraging family planning, women’s empowerment, and HIV/AIDS awareness. Not all the listeners knew this, however, and that was also the point.
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The rate of new HIV infections, which has fuelled the global HIV/AIDS epidemic since the 1980s, has peaked throughout the world and is now declining.

But population growth and the life-prolonging effects of antiretroviral (ARV) treatment mean that the total global number of HIV-infected people is likely to remain about the same for another two decades and will continue to increase in sub-Saharan Africa.

For full article, visit:
http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=79325

Launched in July 2007, this is a 2-year radio serial drama being produced by Population Media Center (PMC) in Nigeria. Through character role-models, the drama aims to enhance knowledge and use of existing health services, provide information about reproductive and general health issues, encourage family planning, and promote delaying marriage and childbearing until adulthood. It also aims to promote small family norms, provide information about HIV transmission, and motivate people to take actions to improve their health and the health of their families.

One of the storylines is about Azumi, who is pregnant while breastfeeding her four-month-old son. Azumi becomes very sick and nearly dies during the delivery of her son. The couple’s story explores the need for birth spacing and contraception in the context of cultural and social demands to have many children quickly.

For full article, visit:
http://www.comminit.com/en/node/269771/38

Muslim leaders in Kenya’s North Eastern Province have resolved to campaign against the promotion of condoms as a means of preventing HIV.

The decision was made after a recent meeting on the theme of “Islam and Health”, attended by more than 60 Muslim scholars and teachers in the provincial capital of Garissa.

“A lot of money is being wasted to poison our community … a huge amount of money is spent on buying condoms, buying immorality,” Sheikh Mohamud Ali, of Garissa district, told IRIN/PlusNews.

For full article, visit:
http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78160

Youth InfoNet 47 – June 2008

This issue of the monthly e-newsletter on youth reproductive health and HIV prevention features 13 program resources with Web links, and 13 journal article summaries on research from China, El Salvador, Namibia, Peru, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, and Zambia.

© USAID, IYWG, INFO Project, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Communication Programs with content managed by FHI 2008

For more information, visit:
http://www.infoforhealth.org/youthwg/pubs/YouthInfoNet/YIN47.shtml

A service that the Kaiser Family Foundation is offering allows access to online coverage of the conference. Kaisernetwork.org’s extensive conference coverage will include live and tape-delayed webcasts of select session; podcasts available in Spanish and English; interviews with newsmakers and journalists; and daily narrated video highlights of major conference developments and much more.

Everyday from August 3-8, Kaisernetwork.org will be sending out a daily update email featuring highlights from the conference. They hope you will consider forwarding the daily update email to members of your listserv for that week, to help extend the reach of the conference. This is a highly useful service because the information presented in this conference will be relevant to the public, researchers, scientists, advocates and policymakers alike. Sign up for the email at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/aids2008.

In addition to the daily conference update email, we also have a variety of syndication options that allow organizations and individuals to feature content on their Web sites, blogs and social networking pages. For more information and to see examples of partners’ sites that syndicated content from the 2006 International AIDS Conference, visit http://www.kaisernetwork.org/aids2008/syndication.cfm.

Thanks to Gary Merritt for this article.
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Family planning in the world’s poorest countries should be dealt with as a higher priority than tackling HIV and Aids, an environmental campaigner has told a science festival.

Founder-director of Forum for the Future Jonathon Porritt told an audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival that failing to prioritise family-planning programmes will have a more damaging impact than HIV and AIDS.

For full article, visit:
http://lifestyle.aol.co.uk

Thanks to SD Shantinath for this press release.
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Press Releases
2008 Releases

Major Shift in HIV Prevention Priorities Needed

Researchers Say Reducing Multiple Sexual Partnerships and Providing Male Circumcision Services Should Be Emphasized
For immediate release: May 8, 2008

Boston, MA — According to a new policy analysis led by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the University of California, Berkeley, the most common HIV prevention strategies-condom promotion, HIV testing, treatment of other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), vaccine and microbicide research, and abstinence-are having a limited impact on the predominantly heterosexual epidemics found in Africa. Furthermore, some of the assumptions underlying such strategies-such as poverty or war being major causes of AIDS in Africa-are unsupported by rigorous scientific evidence. The researchers argue that two interventions currently getting less attention and resources-male circumcision and reducing multiple sexual partnerships-would have a greater impact on the AIDS pandemic and should become the cornerstone of HIV prevention efforts in the high-HIV-prevalence parts of Africa.
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The HIV seroprevalence among women aged 15-24 years was compared according to their pattern of contraceptive use in four African countries: Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi and Zimbabwe. Data were derived from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted between 2003 and 2006 on representative samples, totaling 4549 women.

It is indicated that users of depo-medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA) have a significantly higher seroprevalence than nonusers [odds ratio (OR)=1.82, 95% CI=1.63-2.03] and higher than users of oral contraceptives and users of traditional methods. The results were confirmed in a multivariate analysis including as controls, age, duration since first intercourse, urban residence, education, number of sexual partners in the last 12 months and marital status.

For full article, visit:
http://www.contraceptionjournal.org/article/S0010-7824(08)00061-9/abstract

In Ethiopia, it can be dangerous for a girl to leave the house. Not because of war, or weather, but “weddings”—specifically the long-standing cultural tradition of marriage by abduction.
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