MANILA, Philippines—The Catholic Church’s hardline stance against condom use has been undercutting efforts to stop the spread of HIV/AIDs in the country, a health official said on Thursday.

Undersecretary Mario Villaverde said prohibiting people from using condoms has been having a “detrimental” effect on the government campaign to prevent and stop the incidence of HIV/AIDS.

The Catholic Church considers condoms and other artificial contraceptives like birth control pills and intrauterine devices as anti-life and immoral.

It has been campaigning against using government funds for and universal access to artificial contraceptives.

Villaverde stressed the promotion of condom use to protect people against HIV/AIDS virus was a “different issue” from the use of contraceptives for reproductive health purposes.

He said the Department of Health also supported the promotion of scientific natural family planning methods, which depended on avoiding sex during the woman’s fertile period.

According to Villaverde, condoms protect against contracting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, during sexual intercourse. He said the prophylactic has a 95 percent protection rate.

“We cannot really prevent people, regardless of their religious belief, from engaging in high-risk behavior and so we must educate them and we must provide some preventive and control measures for them,” he told a press briefing at a conference of Asian countries with a low prevalence of the disease.

Although the Philippines is considered a low-prevalence country, with less than .1 percent of the population testing positive for the virus, the number of infected persons in the country keeps growing.

According to DoH data, the number of new HIV/AIDS cases rose to an average of 29 per month in 2007, up from 20 in past years.

From 1984 to 2007, the number of registered cases stood at 3,061, with 2,754 still alive.

But the actual figure could be higher, said the DoH and the World Health Organization.

In 2007, the two agencies estimated that there could be 7,490 people living with HIV in the Philippines, up from the 6,000 estimate in 2002.

Sexual transmission has been the main conduit of the HIV virus, but condom use among the most at risk population was below target, the health department said.

Meanwhile, Rep. Edcel Lagman said the Church campaign against his reproductive health and family planning bill was not working.

The Albay lawmaker said on Thursday he remained “extremely confident” the bill would pass before Congress adjournment in October or December.

“This will no longer reach next year. The agenda will already be different by then,” Lagman said in a telephone interview.

With 86 signatories as of Thursday, Lagman expects to have close to 100 co-authors by next week.

While two legislators withdrew their support for the bill, 17 new ones signed up for it, he said.

Lagman said many of the new co-authors requested him to keep their names under wraps because they “don’t want to be pestered by calls and visits from Church and lay leaders.”

He again called on Church leaders to stop their signature campaign against the bill in church premises.

He said this unfairly coerced people into signing because if they did not do so, they would have been branded as pro-abortion.