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What a weekend. Dave
and I finally got a 3-day mini-vacation to visit New England, namely
Boston and Provincetown. I’d never been to Boston (shocked?) We have two
wonderful friends, Rick and Tom, who we visited in Jamaica Plain. They
usually come here to vacation and visit us.
Since Provincetown was having its 6th
Annual Mates Leather Weekend, and since Rick and Tom had a place to stay
there, we went. Wow. What a beautiful place. We had fantastic weather and
it was a great location. It is the friendliest place I’ve ever visited.
The events went off without a hitch, and proceeds from the Mates Leather
Weekend benefited the Provincetown AIDS Support Group, a fine group of
people and a great organization.
Aside from the fun, it was at the leather
market that I noticed a big change from previous gay events I’d been to.
The local AIDS group’s table was no longer promoting safe sex products
using nonoxynol-9. It seems that in the past few weeks, several makers and
vendors of condoms and sexual lubricants have stopped selling products
treated with that popular spermicide because recent studies have indicated
that nonoxynol-9 can increase the risk of transmitting the AIDS virus.
That’s right, increase.
It’s not news when I say that many
(most?) gay men have long been told to use N-9, because we were told it
was the last resort for protection against HIV and other sexually
transmitted diseases. Why, even my partner, Dave, as a volunteer with
Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, DC in the early 90s, and he was
trained to educate people as to the importance of using N-9.
And now? All these years of misinformation
and it becomes apparent that we’ve been lied to. And to make it worse,
we were giving out information that turned out to be incorrect. It
possibly affected (and infected) many of our gay friends and
acquaintances. It reminds me of Woody Allen’s movie, Sleeper. When he
awoke after many years, he was told to inhale his cigarette deeply and
hold the smoke in his lungs—it was so good for him. Sometimes,
everything changes, and you wonder which direction is up.
A big company, Johnson & Johnson (the
Band-Aid people) is among the producers who are halting the manufacture of
N-9 enhanced lubes and condoms.
The new data is disturbing to say the
least, and it details the potential health risks, especially those
involving anal sex and the transmission of STDs.
Let’s get into a little background. N-9
started its life as a detergent, and it has been used for nearly 50 years
as a vaginal cream intended to be deadly to sperm cells. N-9 works like a
strong detergent, but the drawback is that it can break down or irritate
the cell lining of the rectum or the vagina, which are the first lines of
defense against HIV or STDs. This repeated initiation makes it much easier
for the virus to invade the body. So while N-9 does inactivate viruses and
bacteria, it does more harm in irritating protective membranes.
OK, guys, listen up. There’s a big danger
here for anal sex. N-9 is especially dangerous because the wall of the
rectum is only a single cell thick, as opposed to the vagina, which
happens to have a wall that’s 40 cells thick. So guys are in more danger
than girls, or so it seems. Even if you use a condom with N-9 or just the
N-9 lube, you’re still in serious danger of increasing your likelihood
of contracting an STD. Are we getting angry yet?
Back in 1987, researchers believed that
spermicides could be effective in preventing the spread of HIV and STDs.
And since this type of detergent would kill bacteria and inactivate
viruses, it seemed possible that N-9 would stop the spread of HIV. They
made a mistake—a very big mistake. Later studies appeared to disprove
that theory.
It seems that researchers have known
N-9’s dirty little secret for about 2 years. Are you getting angrier as
you continue to read this? Well, you should be. They knew this from
studies done in 2000, when they discovered in a UN AIDS study that women
who used N-9 had more sexual lesions and a higher rate of HIV than women
who took a placebo. This was a randomized, controlled clinical trial. So
N-9 was not just ineffective—it actually was found to help spread the
disease. It took the World Health Organization two years to get the word
out.
How many lives have been compromised by
this delay?
Do you want another shocking statistic?
Since the lube and condom industry is such a profitable market—about $4
billion dollars worldwide—some manufacturers are not pulling their
product off the shelves because they fear a loss of sales. Some U.S.
manufacturers aren’t eliminating their spermicide treated condoms. That
accounts for 40% of the 295 million dollar market. Anything for a buck.
But we do have advocates and health
officials putting out the word that N-9 should be eliminated from the
market. They say that the public needs to be more informed as to the
dangers of N-9, and they have scheduled a public awareness campaign.
Hopefully this will happen very soon, but
at least now that you’ve read this column, you may consider yourself
warned. But it may be too late for some of us. I have one question: what
took so long to come to this conclusion?
Rick Moore is a personal trainer certified by the
American Fitness Professionals & Associates. Visit him at www.ricksfitness.net,
or call 302-684-0316.
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