US News & World Report: Why Women Should Favor Circumcision: To Prevent HPV Infection

... as if that were a bad thing, then herpes, then AIDS, now HPV... every time another excuse gets debunked a new one is made.

The human race (as homo sapiens) at one point was, supposedly, made up of not more than around 5,000 individuals who all were on the same rough evolutionary level. We somehow managed to reproduce to over 1.2 billion individuals over a period of about 71,000 years. Indeed, it started picking up shortly after modern medicine was developed, somewhere in the 18th or 19th centuries, depending on how you measure it. Since then we have been on a roll and are now looking at 10 billion people by 2100.

And in all that time, somehow, we managed to reproduce without the vast majority of males being circumcised. But suddenly at 6.7 billion people if we don't start circumcising every penis we can get our hands on (so to speak), all hell will break loose, people (ie, women -- the only ones that seem to matter) will start dropping dead all around us and all hell will break loose.

It just never ends, does it?

...about this or any other subject. Until women speak up against it and the media's non-stop campaign in favor of it, this barbaric and medically unnecessary mutilation of their sons' genitals will continue.

Every time some moonbat pops up extolling the virtues of male genital mutilation give them this link.

1) I'm tired of circumcised men trying to justify cutting parts off other people's bodies. Babies aren't going to be getting any STI's before they're old enough to decide for themselves whether or not they want part of their genitals cutting off. It's their body; it should be their decision.

2) These latest studies are from Africa. A 29 year study of males in New Zealand showed a slightly *higher* rate of STI's among circumcised men:
http://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(07)00707-X/abstract

3) If we found out that cutting off part of a girl's genitals reduced her risk of contracting an STI, would that make it acceptable?
This study shows exactly that: http://www.ias-2005.org/planner/Abstracts.aspx?AID=3138

If female circumcision had caught on in the USA (it was promoted in medical papers till at least 1959, and practised till the early 70's), and western researchers were now looking for benefits of female circumcision as enthusiastically as they are looking for benefits of male circumcision, we'd now be getting news articles about how female circumcision help prevent STI's. It wouldn't mean that there aren't better ways to prevent STI's, and it wouldn't make it right.

News just in this week: A jury in Atlanta has awarded $1.8 million to a boy whose penis was severed in a botched circumcision five years ago. The Fulton County jury also awarded the boy's mother another $500,000.

I agree with all your comments and the anger is justified.

I don't know how these doctors that perform these circs are just out walking around. Shouldn't we be camping out at thier doorsteps in protest?

Why is society just sitting back.

Maybe we should designate a day for circumcision protest and camp out at hospitals and the homes of a few doctors accross the nation (or accross the world).

Would that make the news?

"their rate acquiring herpes virus infection plunged by 28 percent and they were 35 percent less likely to get infected with human papillomavirus (HPV), which is responsible for genital warts and, in women, cervical cancer."

I like "plunged". The researchers got 5534 Ugandan men, removed those who already had the herpes virus, leaving 3393 (herpes is very prevalent there), and circumcised half. After two years, 114 circumcised men and 153 non-circumcised men had HSV-2, so nearly 1700 circumcisions may have delayed (not prevented) 39 cases, or about 40 circumcisions to delay one case. The number is bigger where herpes is not so prevalent. But "percentage reduction" sounds much more impressive. It's a big jump from paid adult Ugandan volunteers to US babies.

No direct connection between circumcision and cervical cancer has ever been demonstrated, only some shonky connections between circumcision and HPV, and a partial connection between some varieties of HPV and cancer. HPV is very common, and unlike HIV and HSV-2, the body clears it by itself. (One study got headlines by claiming - using very coarse measurement - that circumcised men cleared it more quickly. Buried in the fine print was the fact that both groups had got it at just the same rate.)

It's striking that these studies came out after it was noted that the HIV studies only seemed to show circumcision protected men from infection by women. These studies have found something for circumcision to protect women from. Circumcision has been a "cure" looking for a disease for about 150 years, usually the most feared disease of the day, and as each new cure is debunked, it finds a new one.

For more information see The Intactivism Pages.