Every year in France, 6,000 people find out that they are HIV positive. For young people, who see AIDS as a chronic disease, condoms are no longer popular.
Would the hood give us the blow of the breakdown? Ask a knowledgeable doctor when was the last major condom study in France, and it’s white. This is how it has proven itself as a contraceptive and prevention tool. 108 million are sold in France each year – a stable figure – and 6 million are distributed free of charge. 80% of the people questioned have a good image of it. “But that is not enough for it to be used,” said Nathalie Lydié, head of the sexual health unit at Public Health France.
The figures speak for themselves: each year in France, more than 6,000 people find out that they are HIV-positive. “We are at a turning point, with multiple reports of insufficient use,” said Professor Willy Rozenbaum, who in 1981 was the first French doctor to diagnose an AIDS patient.
The convertible top is less popular. Among straight people and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people, young people use it intermittently. Yet HIV, like other sexually transmitted diseases and infections, is on the way. “It would be a mistake to think that sex is rational,” Willy Rozenbaum analyzes with hindsight. There is nothing more irrational: it is the assessment of risk in a situation of pleasure, and often the pleasure wins. General practitioners are alarmed to see their young patients slip through the cracks of prevention. “We know that condom protection will not go beyond the level it has reached: it worked very well and prevented millions of infections. But you can’t ask for more from the condom, ”explains Eve Plenel, former Act Up activist and coordinator of the Towards Paris without AIDS campaign at Paris City Hall. TV spots from 1987 (the year the advertising ban was lifted …
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