Experts Denounce CDC’s ‘Blind Promotion’ of Circumcision in Proposed Federal Regulations

Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2014-12-12 21:17

Article here. Excerpt:

'Last Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its proposed guidelines on male circumcision for public comment. The new federal guidelines would recommend male circumcision as a healthy choice that doctors should offer for parents to make for their sons and for teenagers and adults to consider. The CDC background report claims that circumcision has been shown to prevent HIV, HPV and other infections. The new CDC report mimics the 2012 American Academy of Pediatrics Circumcision Policy Statement which drew widespread criticism for its claim that circumcision benefits outweigh the risks.

IntactNews asked the CDC for comment about the risks for an average American male in acquiring HIV. “It’s hard to establish one, single figure for risk of HIV acquisition by a heterosexual male,” the CDC responded in an email to IntactNews today, saying the risks are not well documented.

One study estimates the chance of an American male acquiring HIV through a single unprotected sex act with a known HIV+ female partner is less than 0.04%. That adds up to a 6% risk per year, with an estimated total of 620 new HIV infections per year for white, heterosexual males with known HIV+ or high-risk female partners.

What these numbers show is that the average American man has a comparably low risk of getting HIV through unprotected sex. In fact, the number of average American men getting infected with HIV per year is so low that the CDC does not have data on this demographic.'

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http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/12/03/the-cdc-vs-penises/

Excerpt:

'The latest federal medical guidelines for circumcision are now out, and they emphatically want to return to the era in which infant boys are routinely subjected to the surgical removal of their foreskins – and even adolescent and adult men encouraged to cut their penises. A couple of things need to be emphasized, it seems to me. The core argument is about lowering the risk of HIV infection:

“The first thing it’s important to know is that male circumcision has been associated with a 50 to 60 percent reduction of H.I.V. transmission, as well as a reduction in sexually transmitted infections such as herpes, bacterial vaginosis and the human papilloma virus (H.P.V.), which causes penile and cervical cancer,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, told The New York Times.

The evidence for this is entirely with respect to heterosexual sex, and in sub-Saharan Africa, where, unlike in the US, heterosexual sex accounts for the vast majority of HIV infections. It refers, moreover, only to those cases where men are infected by HIV-positive women – a small fraction of the total HIV cases in the US. You wouldn’t know this from Mermin’s statement – which seems to me designed to scare parents with the HIV boogeyman, rather than present them with a clear sense of the tiny potential health benefits involved. (There’s no evidence that circumcision can reduce the chances of HIV infection in gay sex, which accounts for the big majority of US HIV infections.)'

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Submitted by Matt on Sat, 2014-12-13 03:49

We have a wealth of tagged information over at F-R.net, which might be a good starting point for readers interested in researching and drafting a serious and considered response to the proposed CDC guidelines:

"Intactivism" Subforum Tag Index

Some particularly useful posts have been tagged skepticism.

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Submitted by Minuteman on Sun, 2014-12-14 03:45