"Male Circumcision Overstated As Prevention Tool Against AIDS"

Submitted by Acksiom on Thu, 2007-06-21 09:49

"In new academic research published today in the online, open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal PLoS ONE, male circumcision is found to be much less important as a deterrent to the global AIDS pandemic than previously thought. The author, John R. Talbott, has conducted statistical empirical research across 77 countries of the world and has uncovered some surprising results."

The essential critical point is that the data in previous pro-mutilation/anti-male publications was erroneously manipulated to reflect relative national populations, while nothing was done to address the confounding problem of the signficantly differing rates of heterosexual prostitution between nations.

When the artificial weighting by relative population is removed, however, the apparent correlation between routine and ritual male genital mutilation and a potentially longer amount of time before AIDS/HIV+ infection disappears.

Read the rest of this Medical News Today article HERE.

Read Talbott's full PLoS article HERE.

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Comments

Thank you for posting this. Somehow I doubt the media will cover this with anywhere near the same amount of frenzy they did with the rush-to-judgment pro-circ advocates and their inept studies. We should distribute this story and the links to media as much as possible.

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Submitted by Marc A. on Thu, 2007-06-21 18:48

Contrast the statistical finding of the study, which overwhelmingly implicates the high number of commercial sex workers in Africa in the transmission of HIV/AIDS, with the assessment of Stephen Lewis, the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa:

"And the inability of women to refuse sexual overtures, to say to a man wear a condom, to negotiate safe sex, the destructive power relations around sexuality in areas of gender inequality are dooming women in huge numbers and there is no infrastructure, legal construct, which says women have property rights, inheritance rights there are tough laws against sexual violence and rape because when societies are falling apart there's a lot of sexual violence and that spreads the virus as well. The virus spread in significant measure by predatory male sexual behavior, and we are trying around the world to shore up those women's rights activists who are trying to empower women and inch our way toward gender equality. That's the only way to break the back of the pandemic because the women carry the burden of care, they do all the work and they are being ferociously assaulted by the virus."

This quotation was taken from the transcript of an interview in 2004 on Democracy Now.

Now that the statistically significant factor has been identified, the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa can focus his efforts on controlling the number of commercial sex workers in Africa--or at least tone down his rhetoric while the findings can be corroborated. Gender inequalities should not be overlooked, but concentrating on "predatory male sexual behavior" seems to be ideologically motivated. One might now speak of the "predatory female sexual behavior" of female commercial sex workers, but this would be counterproductive even if it could be statistically quantified.

The author of the study, John Talbot, expressed regret that he did not have access to statistics on male commercial sex workers, so transmission of HIV/AIDS by male sex workers wasn't counted. Nevertheless, the conclusion of the study is strong, and it is safe to say that attributing the cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa to predatory male sexual behavior is statistically unfounded.

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Submitted by OpEd on Sun, 2007-06-24 21:58