fullman

THIS IS AN OLD JOKE. TO KILL PUBIC lice and crabs, all you need is a bottle of gin and a fistful of sand. Just pour gin on the pubic area, to be followed a few minutes later by a liberal scattering of sand. Hopefully the unwanted parasites would get scandalously drunk and ‘stone’ each other to death. If that doesn’t work, if they end up becoming rabid AA members instead, resort to the so-called Pilar Pilapil recipe for treating crabs.

This scheme involves a bloody slab of raw meat, which is either laid on top of or swiped around the infested pubic area. Blood supposedly attracts crabs, so unless they’re card-carrying members of PETA, they should be ready to migrate from your pubes to a place with ‘juicier’ opportunities. Should this fail, well, at least you can use the meat for your next culinary engagement.

Horrified? Welcome to the Philippines, a little kingdom of the Catholic Church in Asia, where ignorance may be the key to Heaven but it certainly won’t help you get rid of simple pubic lice. Below are some equally scary anecdotes that I got from friends working on sexual health about preventing or treating STIs:

• After swallowing semen, immediately drink a glass of hot water to kill HIV and other STIs. It’ll surely burn the virus. And your poor throat.

• To treat gonorrhea (tulo in Filipino), boil coconut water. Let it cool a little bit, then dip your penis in the warm liquid.

• To cure STIs, drink a glass of water mixed with shavings of Perla (a local detergent brand).

These are stories that seem to have been fished out from Macondo, but they’re real. Since the country has no national policy on reproductive and sexual health, Filipinos resort to strange concoctions, voodoo, and the blessing of the Virgin Mary to address sexual health problems. The mantra is that only abstinence and faithfulness would work; if they don’t, then it is entirely your fault.

A year ago, I attended a workshop/consultation organized by the UNAIDS and Philippine National AIDS Council (PNAC) on the gravity of the HIV/AIDS problem in the country (I wrote about it LAGABLAB’s blog). The resource persons were clear about the situation: from ‘low and slow’, HIV prevalence in the country is now ‘hidden and growing’. What’s alarming, according to PNAC and UNAIDS officials, is that the recipe for a full-blown HIV/AIDS epidemic is present in the country. The prevalence of STIs among vulnerable populations - in our case, these include migrant workers, injecting drug users, people in prostitution and their clients, men who have sex with men (or MSMs) – is high. Condom use is low, and multiple sexual partnerships are common. Filipino MSMs, by the way, have an average of two sexual partners in a month.

But who is really at risk? We can all pretend that only the much maligned ’scums of society’ are vulnerable to these infections and diseases, or that HIV/AIDS is the so-called gay cancer. But the vast majority of information and evidence about these diseases that we have point to a brutal, simple truth - unless the entire society is mobilized and as long as our healthcare policies are not evidence-based, we might as well begin manufacturing Perla in capsules and hope that Crabs are truly scared of rosaries.