In-use failure rates

     According to an article by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, published
in Planned Parenthood's Family Planning Perspectives May/June 1989,
condoms have an 11.4 to 22.3 percent failure rate among teens. Studies of
five brands of condoms, reported in the British Journal of Medicine July
11, 1987, showed a failure rate of 26 percent due to rupture and slippage
alone. And the New England Journal of Medicine Mar. 23, 1989 showed
condoms have a failure rate of 10 to 33 percent for preventing
pregnancies
in women 25 years and younger.

     These figures represent rates of pregnancy. However, a woman is
fertile only certain times of the month; diseases can be transmitted at
any time. And condoms cannot provide adequate protection, industry
officials admit.

Industry admits naturally occurring defects
     Even intact condoms have naturally occurring defects (tiny holes
penetrating the entire thickness) measuring five to 50 microns in
diameter
-- 50 to 500 times the size of the HIV virus, writes C. Michael Roland,
head of the Polymer Properties Section at the Naval Research laboratory
in
Washington, D.C. and editor of Rubber Chemistry and Technology, in a
published letter to the Washington Times. [In other words, just as rubber
tires, over time, lose air, condoms (manufactured of the same product,
rubber) also are porous.]

     "... the rubber comprising latex condoms has intrinsic voids about 5
microns (0.0002 inches) in size," Roland states. "Contrarily, the AIDS
virus is only 0.1 micron (4 millionths of an inch) in size. Since this is
a factor of 50 smaller than the voids inherent in rubber, the virus can
readily pass through the condom."

     In addition, condom manufacturers allow 0.4 percent of any given
batch to be defective, before a recall is ordered.

Latex glove specifications
     Studies done by Georgetown Medical University and the National
Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., published in Nature, Sept. 1,
1988,
show that latex gloves, made to much higher specifications than the
condom, have pores 50 times larger than the 0.1 micron HIV virus.

     Even if there were no pores in latex, in-use breakage and slip-off
rates are "so high as to make condoms ineffective for protection against
HIV," says biochemist and molecular biologist Dr. David G. Collart,
Ph.D.,
of Stone Mountain, Ga.

    In fact, "the U.S. government has withdrawn a $2.6 million grant to
study condoms because 'an unacceptably high number of condom users
probably would have been infected in such a study,'" he says, citing a
1989 article published in Infection.