The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is calling on all great minds to invent a low-cost, sensation-enhancing condom that can be widely used in developing countries, where the burden of HIV/AIDS is heaviest due to poor health culture and low condom penetration . Creating a new generation condom is not an easy task – it is necessary to improve a product that has hardly undergone any changes in recent decades. The last major step in the advancement of condoms was the introduction of latex and better quality control. More than 15 billion condoms – male and female – are produced each year for over 750 million users. According to the Grand Challenges to Global Health website, the next step is a condom that “highly enhances or at least does not reduce pleasure, with the goal of increasing consumption.” Additional benefits would be further ease of use, especially for women, improved packaging and storage technologies. Particular attention is paid to overcoming cultural barriers when using the future condom. Proposals nominated for consideration by the foundation must have: a practically testable hypothesis; include a plan for testing and validating the hypothesis; to produce clear and easy-to-interpret results in phase I to be admitted to phase II. Additional points can be earned by creating a condom from new materials that provide better protection or sensitivity, in the latter case, it is necessary that the greater amount of pleasure is not at the expense of the protective qualities of the condom. The foundation emphasizes that the competition will not consider non-technological, social or educational events, as well as testing already available commercial products. The condom of the future must be cheap and applicable in countries with low per capita income.
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