Public Health Officials Overstate Effectiveness of Condoms, Op-Ed Says

"Condoms are not nearly as safe" as experts once thought, Alma Golden and Shepherd Smith write in a Scripps Howard News Service/Nando Times op-ed. Golden, a clinical associate professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, and Smith, president of the Institute for Youth Development, attended several meetings over the past year on the degree of "safety" condoms "really offer." The meetings included "experts" from the CDC, National Institutes of Health and the FDA. Golden and Smith said that the experts "are concluding" that the failure rate of condoms "is probably worse than [for] Firestone tires." The authors state that "most studies" indicate that condoms "break or slip" 2% to 4% of the time. In addition, with "typical use," 13.9% of "condom-using couples become pregnant within the year," according to one study, and other data suggests that "even when used consistently and correctly by high school students having sex, condoms may still not protect them from such dangerous STDs as genital herpes and