Circumcision: Safety Has Its Price
According to a new study, circumcised men are more resistant to STDs, with the process lowering one's chances of herpes infection by 28%, HPV infection by 35% and HIV infection by 60%. More here.
3/30/2009
According to a new study, circumcised men are more resistant to STDs, with the process lowering one's chances of herpes infection by 28%, HPV infection by 35% and HIV infection by 60%. More here.
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2 comments:
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 today: 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.
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/atlanta/stories/2009/03/30/botched_circumcision_suit.html
The disease statistics are far from "above reproach". Those big percentage reductions mask low rates being slighly reduced. The "60%" represents 73 circumcised men who didn't get HIV after they circumcised 5,400. More than twice as many circumcised men dropped out of the studies, their HIV status unknown, as non-circumcised men were infected, so there could be nothing to it at all. In seven African countries, more of the circumcised men have HIV than the non-circumcised.
If you go back to the studies themselves, you invariably find that the results have been "beaten up" - a small benefit of circumcision to some tiny subset (such as men "at known risk") has been generalised to the entire population, for example, or a statistically non-signficant result presented as if it was major.
(I notice your banana has started to rot. They do that faster when they don't have their protective skin.)
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