DO PROGRAMMES that promote sexual abstinence help cut HIV rates? The question matters, because the US government says they do and . But when Kristen Underhill’s team at the University of Oxford, UK, examined the literature, they found that almost all the evidence suggests not.
They studied 13 trials of US-based abstinence programmes and found that none helped to reduce the incidence of unprotected sex or cut the number of partners that young people slept with (). A similar lack of success has already been found in abstinence projects in developing…
