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| Condom |
Bill Gates has offered $100,000 (about N15.8m) for anyone to
come up with “next generation condom that significantly preserves or enhances
pleasure, in order to improve uptake and regular use.”
Last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF)
selected a reinvention of the toilet that functions as a solar-powered
wastewater treatment system. Now, Gates is challenging inventors to use
improvements in materials science to develop a condom that feels good.
The idea is that, as reliable and easy-to-use as condoms
are, men supposedly experience more pleasure having bareback sex than they do
using a condom. The challenge asks:
Is it possible to develop a product without this stigma, or
better, one that is felt to enhance pleasure? If so, would such a product lead
to substantial benefits for global health, both in terms of reducing the
incidence of unplanned pregnancies and in prevention of infection with HIV or
other STIs?
The challenge states that condoms have been in use for
around 400 years, and have not improved in the past 50 years. However, the
scientific advances made in the past 50 years, the initiative reads, have not
been applied to this important area:
Material science and our understanding of neurobiology has
undergone revolutionary transformation in the last decade yet that knowledge
has not been applied to improve the product attributes of one of the most
ubiquitous and potentially underutilized products on earth.
A better feeling condom could go a long way to convincing
some men that they might as well roll one on before sex, if only for their own
safety.
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