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US House Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees today asked Bush administration to explain the failure of US-funded "abstinence and be faithful" HIV prevention programs for youth.

Oversight Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, and Congresswoman Barbara Lee wrote to US Global AIDS Coordinator Mark Dybul to ask how his office will respond to a recent evaluation which found that the US$15 billion dollar programs failed to serve the needs of young people who are or may become sexually active.

Independent evaluators found that most programs lacked adequate information about partner reduction, fidelity, condom use, and cross-generational and transactional sex.

Most programs did not contain age-appropriate content, especially for older youth, and failed to refer participants appropriately to more comprehensive programs, the evaluators reported.

The USAID funded study showed that while sex with adult men is a significant factor in HIV risk for adolescent girls, contributing to higher rates of infection among girls than boys the same age, few of the curricula had specific skill-based lessons to deal with issues of gender inequality, including cross-generational and commercial sex.

"Incorporating focused lessons on important gender-based issues, including cross-generational and transactional sex, is likely to be more effective than only promoting abstinence and ignoring issues of power imbalance that put youth at risk of coercive and unwanted sex," the evaluators pointed out.

Waxman, Lantos and Lee asked Dybul to describe how you plan to respond to the findings and recommendations of this report as they relate to the needs of sexually active youth.