"Male circumcision helps women too"

Submitted by Mastodon on Mon, 2014-09-01 17:08

Article here. Excerpt:

'In a South African community where large numbers of men had been circumcised, women who had sex only with circumcised partners had a 15 per cent lower risk of being infected by HIV compared with women who also had uncircumcised partners, it found.

"The risk reduction is small, but it is a start," said investigator Kevin Jean of France's National Agency for AIDS Research (ANRS).

The study was presented on the final day of the 20th International AIDS conference in Melbourne, Australia.
...
There was also good news from the questions on sex behaviour: men were unlikely to engage in unprotected intercourse after being circumcised, he said.

"What we are seeing is an indirect effect," he said. "Circumcision reduces HIV among men, and if fewer men are infected, they are less likely to infect women."

He stressed, though: "The message still has to be made that they use condoms."'

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So, based on the numbers of women who actually had sex exclusively with circumcised men, the difference in HIV infection of women dropped. Now, how about the rate of HIV infection among the men? No report. And the doctor interviewed said it was a small change in rate. (Is it even statistically significant?)

Still worth cutting off the foreskins of men, though, even if it may make men more susceptible to HIV infection -- or not? Has anyone bothered to study it?

Will circumcising females also help reduce the spread of HIV? Has anyone suggested women and girls get circumcised to help reduce HIV infection among men?

I haven't even started into the human rights issues associated with circumcising infants or even minor males, or telling men falsehoods or misleading information to get them to agree with having the procedure. But human rights as applied to males is as we know, low on the list of consideration. MANN regulars have read/heard it before.

And despite all this circumcision, the article nonetheless ends with the idea that even after all those men's penises have been mutilated by the machinations of medical and financial opportunists looking to make bank off selling foreskins to multinational cosmetic and research corporations, men still are told they need to use condoms. Well, if the relationship between condom use and avoiding STD infection were actually taught to both men and women first, the whole circumcision ruse could be avoided in the first place. But that doesn't make anyone money, does it?

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2014-09-02 03:13