Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Monday, February 01, 2010

Safe Sex and Foolproof Birth Control

The world should sit up and take notice. Coming to stores near you, from the success story of China which engineered a one-child policy among its vast population, contraceptive devices certain to change the very essence of what birth control reliability really means.

Does the word "counterfeit" ring a bell, governing the national out-put of entrepreneurial manufacture of signature goods legally copyrighted and produced elsewhere in the world?
There, you've got the picture in its tawdry entirety. More or less. Less trust, more problems. More affordable, less trustworthy.

China, so enraptured by its one-child policy success which has left it with an over-abundance of males and a paucity of females, has more or less solved its problem of over-population, in a sense. Fewer females, fewer offspring. Unfortunately, far more soured males. Seeking fewer and fewer nuptial opportunities.

And unhappy families when catastrophic events like earthquakes are twinned with shoddy construction methods to produce even fewer children when single-child families are suddenly bereft of their treasured child buried under the rubble of his rural school. But those are details, and huge countries with immense populations have many details besetting them.

It's the latest Chinese-produced knockoff that should have the world community of nubile young sitting up and taking notice, unless they're prepared to bring a whole lot more babies into an unprepared world. For inferior products resembling the product of respectable condom manufacturers are being produced in a non-state-approved $530-million industry.

Over 300 manufacturers producing condoms under one thousand titillatingly imaginative names like Durex, Rough Rider and Love Card. Get the picture? Some look like and are labelled Trojan brand, and they're being sold in small discount stores in New York, Texas and Virginia, although they're being sold everywhere people look for great prices. Everywhere.

"Given the vast size and complexities of the society, it is not surprising that there continue to be problems with product quality", a professor at Peking University claimed defensively. Adequate state monitoring systems are costly, which would result in higher consumer prices. "It's impossible to have enhanced surveillance on the cheap."

Chinese vendors feel the pain: "We need to market better-quality products. Chinese people deserve them." Yes, yes they do. And so do world consumers of inexpensive knock-offs fancifully believed to be of good quality by people whose incomes celebrate cheaper alternatives.

Chinese health authorities are quick to admit that inferior contraceptives are utterly useless as conception 'protection'. Worse, they may help to spread infectious diseases. "People could be infected with AIDS, genital warts or other diseases if they hold the rubber bands or strings in their mouths while weaving their hair into plaits or buns", said a dermatologist.

Fact being that recycled, used condoms are being transformed into colourful, practical and cheap hair bands. Um, yes.

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