CHRIS SMITH is clearly an honest and courageous man. But he is not quite speaking the truth when he declares that: “HIV-Aids is a medical condition just like any other.” It is not. Other medical conditions — brain tumours, heart failure — strike their victims from ill luck, with a possible element of genetic predisposition. With HIV-Aids, there is a key factor of choice and personal responsibility: it mostly occurs where the victim has made specific behaviour choices, usually involving multiple partners.

Mr Smith said he was encouraged to reveal his own HIV condition after Nelson Mandela said, some weeks ago — after the death of Mandela’s 54-year-old son from Aids — that we should be more open and less stigmatising about HIV-Aids. This is quite right: no illness should be stigmatised. But the proper scientific approach to disease is also to seek to prevent it. And the way to help to prevent HIV, particularly in Africa, is to explain that it is linked with personal responsibility, and it can be halted by behaviour change.

In some parts of the Third World there is a repellent superstition — which missionaries in the 19th century previously observed in association with syphilis — that the “cure” for sexually transmitted disease is to have intercourse with a young virgin. Thus, young girls in Africa, and indeed India, too, are being subjected to sex with older men afflicted with HIV. This wicked myth should be stamped on with all the rigour of law and custom: and perhaps Mandela, with his worldwide influence, might allude critically to this deplorable idea at some point. He might perhaps denigrate another practice also seen in Africa: when the widow of a man who dies from Aids is obliged to have intercourse with his surviving brother.

Chris Smith obviously wants to underline the idea that people with HIV can lead normal, healthy lives — as he has done over the past 17 years — where the proper drugs are available. Such medication should, of course, be available universally. But behaviour modification is also an imperative in the fight against Aids. The simple formula of ABC — the options of Abstinence: Be Faithful: or use a Condom — says the essential.

If cancer of the colon or motor neurone disease could be prevented by such a simple formula, then Aids-HIV would be the same as any other medical condition. And for the same reason, it is not.