The INFO Project Blog

What makes a family planning program successful?

The INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in collaboration with the World Health Organization and the Implementing Best Practices Partners, invites you to share your opinions in a short survey on Elements of Successful Family Planning Programs:

At the end of the survey you will be invited to register for an online discussion forum on this topic, scheduled to take place December 10-21, 2007.

Please share this survey announcement with your colleagues and friends. Thank you for your input!

Survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB22786ZF78CZ

The staff at the Center for Communication Programs (CCP) was fortunate enough to screen the documentary HIV Positive Voices: An Inside Look at the AIDS Epidemic in Baltimore in observance of World Aids Day 2007. The documentary, produced by CCP in association with Stuart Productions, explores the stories of four individuals in Baltimore living with HIV. The Baltimore metropolitan area currently has the second highest rate of new AIDS diagnoses in the country.

The viewer experiences the touching story of Rickeena, a 15 year-old teenager who contracted HIV perinatally from her mother and who educates others in her community about HIV and AIDS. Then we meet David, who contracted HIV through injection drug use and who started a clean lifestyle after being released from prison for crimes committed.

Later in the film, Kimberly Smolen tells viewers that she was infected with HIV from a college boyfriend and discovered her HIV status after donating blood. She had been a marathon runner but then fell into a destructive period in her life consisting of drug addiction and homelessness.

Read the rest of this entry »

I came across an interesting article yesterday: Older white women join Kenya’s sex tourists.

Upon reading the title, I wondered, am I mistaken? Should it read the other way around? So rich women apparently come to Kenya to pay for sex with attractive young Kenyan men. I have heard of sex tourism, and have seen older men walking arm in arm with various much younger women throughout various locales in Thailand, however I have never heard of the reverse phenomenon occurring.

In reading further, especially in light of World AIDS day, I was disturbed to discover that some of the women choose not to use condoms when engaging in transactional sex as they deem them too “businesslike” and an interruption to carrying out exotic fantasies. However, on a positive note, some hotel managers have begun to monitor the situation and discourage such negative tourism.

-Posted by Seth

I won’t lie. I take the internet for granted. I can not count the number of times I use it, both at work and at home. I check my Treo while walking my dog. Will I ever be able to live without the internet? Prior to learning about the eGranary Digital Library through a presentation the director Cliff Missen gave at the quarterly Health Information Publications Network meeting, my answer would have been no. However, I am now aware that thousands of people across the developing world are accessing over 10 million high quality resources without the use of the internet.

eGranary is a platform that allows articles and information to be stored on a local area network (LAN), allowing users connected to that network to access documents, even if they are not connected to the internet. Users are able to access items much more quickly through eGranary than if they were to use the internet. Bandwidth is expensive in much of the developing world, and currently those who are lucky enough to have access to the internet are paying very large sums of money for slow access.

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I love the female condom. No, really, I do. This may seem a little odd coming from a male, however I have seen the enthusiasm on female adolescents’ faces after showing them how to use the female-initiated dual protection method.

The female condom allows women to have a choice and a say in family planning decisions. Unfortunately, women in the developing world do not yet love the female condom with the same ardor as I do, as both distribution and uptake of the female condom around the world have not been as great as expected.

Thus, I was excited to hear that the female condom is currently receiving a makeover to make it more “user-friendly”. Donald McNeil Jr.’s November 13 New York Times article “Redesigning a condom so women will use it” discusses the proposed new design of the female condom.

The new condom will be made of a thinner polyurethane designed to better transmit warmth and will contain one bunched up end as opposed to a plastic ring, making it easier to insert.

McNeil argues that although the condom will be thinner, less bulky, and easier to insert, the new condom still does not solve the problem of allowing women to use dual contraceptive methods without her partner knowing. However, the truth is, microbicides are still in clinical trials and thus unavailable, so currently if a male does not choose to use a condom, the only recourse a female has to protect herself from both HIV and pregnancy is the female condom. Although it is difficult, and unheard of in most cultures, to bring up any mention of condom use within a marriage, this is not a fault of the female condom itself, but rather of societal norms.

The US Food and Drug Administration has stated that the new design must pass clinical trials prior to being made available on the market. However, due to the prohibitive cost of such trials it may be quite a long time before users around the world will benefit from an improved design. Until that time, global health leaders and pioneers must continue the work they have done around the globe to promote the female condom, and convince users that the current device is not just a device for sex workers (McNeil notes that they are among the device’s largest constituents).

Although critics have noted that the female condom is more expensive to produce than the male condom, one must think of the future cost HIV infection and maternal mortality will inflict on already poor countries.

Just like the male condom, it is not enough to simply put such devices into the hands of women. Women must be educated on how to approach the subject of condom use with their partners (whether it be male or female condoms) and how to correctly insert and remove the existing female condom.

We are producing a new resource to address many of these remaining challenges. Stay tuned for INFO’s forthcoming website, Condoms: Your Questions Answered.

Posted by Seth Rosenblatt, Program Specialist