HIV/AIDS roared onto the scene in the 1980’s. Appearing out of nowhere, this dreadful disease ensured a slow, debilitating march toward death for its victims.

Initially, AIDS was seen as a threat to everyone. AIDS education became mandatory in schools, and newspapers published heartrending stories about individuals—both straight and gay—who had been infected in a variety of ways.

Over time, evidence mounted that the vast majority of cases were appearing in high-risk groups, including gay men, intravenous drug users and sex workers, and in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the campaign to portray AIDS as a broad-based threat continued.

Was the scope of the AIDS threat oversold? Brendan O’Neill, writing in the London Guardian, believes it was deliberately exaggerated:

After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease … the head of the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret. Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said over the weekend that, outside very poor African countries, Aids is confined to “high-risk groups”, including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers. And even in these communities it remains quite rare. ‘It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in countries [outside sub-Saharan Africa]’, he said.

 In other words? All that hysterical fear mongering about Aids spreading among sexed-up western youth was a pack of lies.

O’Neill claims there were early indications that the threat had been overstated. He quotes AIDS worker Elizabeth Pisani, who says that, as early as 1998, it was clear that “HIV wasn’t going to rage through the billions in the ‘general population’, and we knew it.”

He also cites comments by James Chin, a U.C. Berkeley epidemiologist. In Chin’s view, it was always a “glorious myth” that there would be an “HIV epidemic in general populations.” Chin attributes this myth to “misunderstanding or deliberate distortions of HIV epidemiology” by UNAIDS [Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS] and other AIDS activists.

Data about new cases provided the best measure of this exaggeration, says O’Neill. Throughout the 1980’s, only 20 cases of HIV in Great Britain were contracted through heterosexual contact with an individual infected in Europe, he claims.

“Most of the small-scale spread of ‘heterosexual AIDS’ has been a result of infected individuals arriving from Africa,” according to O’Neill.

Why the push to falsely universalize the AIDS threat in the 1980s and ’90s? In O’Neill’s view, it was inspired by an old-fashioned moral crusade:

Through baseless fear-mongering, officials sought to police and regulate the behavior of the public. No longer able to appeal to outdated Victorian ideals of chastity or restraint, the powers-that-be used the specter of an Aids calamity to terrify us into behaving ‘responsibly’ in sexual and social matters.

In my view, O’Neill — with his overheated rhetoric — has this backwards. The campaign to universalize the AIDS threat was not a moral crusade, but an attempt to deflect such a crusade. AIDS appeared when gays were beginning a push for general acceptance. This included attempts to overcome the widespread perception that gay sex was risky and unnatural.  If AIDS was tied to gays, activists feared, it might seem to confirm these perceptions.

Was the AIDS’ threat “oversold?”

No. AIDS is a dreadful disease, which has taken millions of lives here and abroad. The resources we have poured into alleviating suffering and seeking a cure are amply justified.

But could we have saved more lives if we had targeted our resources more wisely, rather than pouring millions into a misguided campaign to universalize the threat?

The AIDS epidemic in Africa is a disaster. And no one seems to have a solution.

Or do they? Christian churches have devised the most promising approach, say Edward Green and Allison Ruark of Harvard University’s AIDS Prevention Research Project, writing in First Things. Trouble is, it’s based on concepts of abstinence and sexual fidelity, which are highly unpopular with the global AIDS establishment.

That establishment continues to cling to certain “myths” about the causes of the epidemic, write Green and Ruark. For example: “Poverty and discrimination are the problem.” “Condoms are the answer.” “Sexual behavior will not change.”

Such notions, say the authors,

are held as self-evident truths by many in the AIDS establishment. And they result in efforts that are at best ineffective and at worst harmful, while the AIDS epidemic continues to spread and exact a devastating toll in human lives.

Prevention efforts that focus primarily on pushing condoms don’t work. Why? For one thing, “few people outside a handful of high-risk groups use condoms consistently, no matter how vigorously condoms are promoted,” the authors write. In this connection, they cite a UNAIDS-commissioned 2004 review of condom use, which found “no definite examples yet of generalized epidemics that have been turned back by prevention programs based primarily on condom promotion.”

In contrast, Christian churches use the “ABC” approach — “Abstain. Be Faithful, or use Condoms” – whose core is “deep changes” in sexual behavior. According to Green and Ruark, every African country where HIV infections have declined has seen a decrease in the proportion of men and women reporting more than one sexual partner in a year. The other factor associated with a decrease in infections is a decline in premarital sex among young people.

The authors conclude,

If AIDS prevention is to be based on evidence rather than ideology or bias, then fidelity and abstinence programs need to be at the center of programs for general populations.

Uganda provides a good example of the positive results that profound behavior change can bring:

A 2001 study of condom use in rural Uganda found that only 4.4 percent of the population reported consistent usage in the previous year, a rate that is probably typical of much of Africa.

In contrast to the estimated 95 percent or more of Africans who did not practice consistent condom use in the past year, studies from all over Africa show a solid majority of men and women reporting fidelity over the past year, with a majority of unmarried young men and women reporting abstinence.

Why is the AIDS establishment so hostile to prevention approaches that seek to change behavior? At the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Bill Gates was actually booed when he mentioned fidelity and abstinence.

Green and Ruark suggest one reason:

It is not in the interest of a multi-billion dollar global AIDS industry to endorse interventions that are low-cost and homegrown and that rely on simple behavior change rather than medical products or services provided by outside experts.

And they pose a related question: Is the AIDS establishment “more concerned with upholding a Western notion of sexual freedom or with saving lives?”

How terrible to have to ask.