Posted on 08/19/2007 5:11:38 PM PDT by neverdem
JOHANNESBURG, Aug. 19 -- President Bush's $15-billion anti-AIDS program will begin investing significant money in making circumcision available to African men seeking to protect themselves from HIV, top U.S. health officials said Sunday.
Recent research showing that circumcision dramatically cuts the rate of HIV infection is highly convincing, a delegation of U.S. officials, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, told reporters in Johannesburg.
Countries taking part in the President's Emergency Program For AIDS Relief have been invited to seek money to expand access to the procedure.
Circumcision funding would be small at first, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for individual countries. But it is likely to grow to be "an important part" of the program in coming months and years, said Kent R. Hill, an assistant administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The cells in the foreskin of a penis are especially vulnerable to HIV, and removing the foreskin makes a man about 60 percent less likely to contract the virus, studies in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda have shown. The research reinforces studies showing that regions with high circumcision rates generally have lower rates of HIV.
In Kenya, men from the Luo tribe, which does not circumcise its boys, have an HIV rate of 24 percent compared to a national rate of 7 percent. Kenya is among the nations preparing to expand circumcision services, Hill said.
Some other African nations have reacted warily to the studies. Most tribes in Africa once routinely circumcised boys in manhood rituals but the practice has declined in southern Africa, in part because of the influence of European missionaries who discouraged the practice as primitive.
Last year, prior to the recent studies, the Bush administration cut funding for a small program that was offering circumcision...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
so no matter how much money is spent, there is always a cut, right?
Oh brother. I thought we’d already hit bottom.
I wish we would, if only because The President is spending money we can ill afford.
Sometimes I feel like we are trying harder to keep people in other countries alive than they are trying to survive. When it gets to the point where the Samaritan is trying harder than the victim, I say let it go.
*snicker*
Hey maybe we can trade we defund the U.N. and stop feeding the world at large and we snip all those who wish to be snipped sounds like a fair trade to me ....
This is “compassionate conservatism” he talked about in 2000.
I had hoped he meant he’d be compassionate toward the American tax-payer.
Link to map overlay illustrating this thinking:
http://www.synergyaids.com/documents/MaleCircumcision_New.pdf
Thanks for the link.
It takes only common sense to recognize that these numbers cannot be valid. Given the general medical conditions in Africa, if these numbers were accurate the Luo would be extinct in 10 years, at most.
My math is not up to figuring the population decline for Kenya that would result from a 7% infection rate, but their population would for darn sure be decreasing, not increasing at a 2.8% rate.
There are roughly 500k HIV positive people in the US, an infection rate of roughly .15%. If the US had a 7% infection rate, this would be 21M people, and the US population would be in a nosedive.
Muslim reminder:
That’s MALE circumcision.
gee, you would think the corelating factor would be the SEXUAL BEHAVIOR ....
correlation does not equal causation.
I bet a similar chart can be done with christianity, moslem terrorists, education and any other number of concepts.
BTTT!
All these people need is some soap and water and condums. Start with the soap and water.
LOL, even better!
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