FDA Advisers Recommend New Female Condom

By Molly M. Ginty, Women's eNews. Posted December 16, 2008.

There's also the problem of customer complaints.

"Some women report that the female condom squeaks," says Serra Sippel, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Health and Gender Equity. "But more lubrication can help with that problem, and the newer version is supposed to be less noisy."

"My partner and I got a female condom more than a year ago," says Leslie Booker, a youth advocate in New York City. "We're curious about using it, but every few months, we take it out and stare at it just don't know where to begin because it's so baggy, bulky and unwieldy."

To use the female condom correctly and prevent slippage, women must follow the device's diagramed instructions, learning how to pinch the condom's inner ring, slip that ring inside the vagina and fit around the cervix, all while fitting the outer ring snugly around the labia.

A Growing Need

Health advocates say the female condom would likely win more converts if there was a concerted effort to educate women about how it works. Manufacturer studies show 50 to 70 percent of users find the device acceptable once they have experience using it.

Due to a lack of investment, education efforts have so far fallen flat.

"We're a small manufacturing company, and we just haven't had the resources to mount massive marketing campaigns," says Jack Weissman, a vice president at the Female Health Company of Chicago, the sole maker and supplier of the FC and FC2.

Women's advocates say a combination of high costs, limited availability, insufficient political will and a lack of social acceptability pose problems in promoting the product. That's especially true in AIDS-ravaged regions such as Africa, where 75 percent of HIV-positive women live and where female condoms may be needed most.

"Nongovernmental organizations in Africa have clients who want female condoms, but they don't have enough of them to hand out," says Anna Forbes, deputy director of the Washington-based Global Campaign for Microbicides. "One health worker in Rwanda told me she mentions the female condom as part of her HIV-prevention workshop, but has never actually seen one herself. Female condoms are in fact so rare that they represent just 0.2 percent of the world's total condom supply."

Health advocates stress the needs of at-risk women who receive female condoms through national and international health programs, which distribute more than 90 percent of the 35 million female condoms manufactured each year.

More than 15.5 million women worldwide are HIV-positive, and women comprise half of all HIV cases, reports the Geneva-based World Health Organization. More than 280,000 U.S. women have HIV, and its incidence among them has quadrupled in the past two decades, reports the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Because FC2 has been approved by the World Health Organization, it is already being purchased and used by international aid organizations that don't rely on FDA approval," says Sippel. "But health organizations here must wait for FDA approval, which could greatly help them in their efforts to save more women's lives."

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Molly M. Ginty is a freelance writer based in New York.

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