Julia Medew; 24/1/09
Iyt has been labelled the cruellest cut of all, but HIV experts are calling for a return to routine male circumcision in Australia to help curb transmission of the virus into the future. Alex Wodak, a physician who has worked on HIV since it was identified in the 1980s, has called for parents to be educated about the benefits of circumcision after research showed it reduced the likelihood of transmission between heterosexuals in Africa. “This is an intervention which is effective, inexpensive, lifelong, safe, and could dramatically alter the course of an epidemic,” said Dr Wodak, who is also director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
See: http://www.theage.com.au/national/doctor-says-the-cut-lowers-risk-of-hiv-20090123-7orv.html
Tags: Australia, Circumcision, HIV/Aids
Circumcision can only possibly help men who have unsafe sex with HIV+ partners, so why this bizarre obsession with genital surgery when we know that ABC works better than circumcision ever could? (ABC=Abstinence, Being Faithful, Condoms).
The studies which allegedly show a reduction in HIV among circumcised men are highly questionable. Not one of them was finished, despite the protective affect appearing to decline well below the oft-reported 65%, and several of the subjects disappeared. The fact that one study described circumcision as “equivalent” to a “vaccine of high efficacy” seems to show clear bias. They appear to have been seeking a certain result. One has to wonder how many of the people promoting circumcision in Africa are themselves circumcised. Some of them have been promoting circumcision for decades.
Other epidemiological studies have shown no correlation between HIV and circumcision, but rather with the numbers of sex workers, or the prevalence of “dry sex”.
The two continents with the highest rates of AIDS are the same two continents with the highest rates of male circumcision. Rwanda has almost double the rate of HIV in circed men than intact men, yet they’ve just started a nationwide circumcision campaign. Rwanda has more than nine million people, but only one doctor for every 50,000 people and one nurse for every 3,900 people, so why would they want to waste their medical resources operating on intact Rwandan men who are less likely to be HIV+ than circumcised Rwandan men? Other countries where circumcised men are *more* likely to be HIV+ than intact men are Cameroon, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, and Tanzania. Something is very wrong here. These people aren’t interested in fighting HIV, but in promoting circumcision (or sometimes anything-but-condoms), and their actions will cost lives.
Circumcised male virgins are more likely to be HIV+ than intact male virgins, as the operation sometimes infects men.
The latest news is that circumcised HIV+ men are more likely to transmit the virus to women than intact HIV+ men (even after the healing period is over). Eight additional women appear to have been infected during that study, solely because their husbands were circumcised.
Female circumcision seems to protect against HIV too btw, but we wouldn’t investigate cutting off women’s labia, and then start promoting that.
If people were really interested in fighting HIV, rather than promoting circumcision, they would be focussing on ABC. The level of knowledge about HIV in some African countries is quite frightening. In Malawi for instance, only 57% know that condoms protect against HIV/AIDS, and only 68% know that limiting sexual partners protects against HIV/AIDS. There are people who haven’t even heard of condoms. It just seems really misguided to be hailing male circumcision as the way forward. It would help if some of the aid donors didn’t refuse to fund condom education, or work that involves talking to prostitutes. There are African prostitutes that sleep with 20-50 men a day, and some of them say that hardly any of the men use a condom. If anyone really cares about men, women, and children dying in Africa, surely they’d be focussing on education about safe sex rather than surgery that offers limited protection at best, and runs a high risk of risk compensatory behaviour.