NDORI, Kenya, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- Health officials praised contraceptives and anti-retroviral drugs in Africa as curtailing the spread of AIDS but ethical concerns delayed the programs' funding.
Humanitarian health officials said programs distributing anti-retroviral drugs to pregnant women in African prevented more than 100,000 cases of pediatric HIV between 1999 and 2006, while contraception prevented 173,000 such cases, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Political and financial rhetoric aimed at addressing the HIV epidemic in Africa does not translate to actual funding as the issue is hung up over the debate over birth control.
Officials say improving the availability of birth control in Africa could save tens of thousands of lives more effectively and less expensive than anti-retroviral drugs.
The U.S. Agency for International Development noted a reversal in the once "spectacular decline" in fertility rates in Kenya due to international funding for contraceptives and education awareness.
The support for such measures began to drop in 1996 when the evangelical Christian movement gained influence in the Republican Party and again in 2003 when the Bush administration refused to support HIV programs that advocated birth control.
A United Nations estimate says 90 percent of the 2.5 million childhood cases of HIV infection are in sub-Saharan Africa.
