Posted on 07/10/2006 8:36:10 PM PDT by July 4th
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Circumcising men routinely across Africa could prevent millions of deaths from AIDS, World Health Organization researchers and colleagues reported on Monday.
They analyzed data from trials that showed men who had been circumcised had a significantly lower risk of infection with the AIDS virus, and calculated that if all men were circumcised over the next 10 years, some two million new infections and around 300,000 deaths could be avoided.
Researchers believe circumcision helps cut infection risk because the foreskin is covered in cells the virus seems able to easily infect. The virus may also survive better in a warm, wet environment like that found beneath a foreskin.
So if men were circumcised, fewer would become infected and thus could not infect their female partners.
The human immunodeficiency virus or HIV, which causes AIDS, now infects close to 40 million people and has killed another 25 million. It mostly affects sub-Saharan Africa and the main mode of transmission is sex between a man and a woman.
Several studies have suggested that men who are circumcised have a lower rate of HIV infection. This has been especially noticeable in some parts of Africa, where some groups are routinely circumcised while neighboring groups are not.
Last year, Dr. Bertran Auvert of the French National Research Agency INSERM and colleagues at WHO found that circumcised men in South Africa were 65 percent less likely to become infected with the deadly and incurable virus.
His team then did an analysis to see what would happen if all African men were circumcised.
"In West Africa, male circumcision is common and the prevalence of HIV is low, while in southern Africa the reverse is true," they wrote in the current report, published in the Public Library of Science Medicine.
"This analysis shows that male circumcision could avert nearly six million new infections and save three million lives in sub-Saharan Africa over the next twenty years," they wrote.
Overall, they project that universal male circumcision would reduce the rate of infections by about 37 percent.
"Male circumcision alone cannot bring the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa under control. Even circumcised men can become infected, though their risk of doing so is much lower," the journal cautioned in a commentary.
And a zipper lock will stop all AIDs cases.
Well, even more reason to circumcise those prone to spreading AIDS.
If sex is MORE pleasurable with the foreskin intact, then circumcising will not only make these guys more sanitary thus slowing the spread of AIDS, they might be less likely to have sex, which is the true cause of the spread of AIDS.
Either way, it works. And to think, the pro-foreskin researcher just made an excellent case for circumcision....huh!
I still give credence to it being useful for *something* - why did God ask the Jews to be circumcized then?
When someone gets less of a kick with a cigarette than he or she used to, it makes him or her want to smoke more, to get the same effect as before. So this point debunks what you proposed, doesn't it?
:^)
The correct term for this is "Ritual Genital Mutilation".
The same term is used for both males and females.
The voodoo medical types come up with a new reason to make money mutilating every new generation. Just as soon as the latest reason is disproven, they come up with a new one.
Doctors also schedule hysterectomies very commonly. They continue to come up with new reasons for removing healthy tissue, for as much money as the market will bear.
I remember when mine was ripped off. I was about three or four days old.
What a PITA it was!
Oh yeah we do. We're missing watching our ladies recoil in horror at the sight our third-world-style johnsons.
Which begs the question of why the mostly circumcised U.S. has an HIV rate four times that of the mostly uncircumcised EU. It might just be that circumcised men in Africa tend to live in more conservative Muslim communities, but of course acknowledging that would mean conceding that behavior is the culprit, and not mere anatomy. And besides that it goes without saying that the genital mutilation lobby will seize even the flimsiest of rationales.
Over and over again the genital mutilation lobby trots out these flimsy African analyses and hypothetical projections, but I've yet to hear an explanation as to why they're ignoring the massive real-life experiment that's already been conducted between the US and the EU, wherein the US has ended up with four times the HIV rate despite over a hundredfold greater rate of circumcision..
PS. And that's even disregarding the fact that a greater proportion of HIV cases in the EU is the result of IV drug use than HIV in the United States.
Your "fireman". /south park
OT:....(kinda)
One of my favorite Rodney Dangerfield jokes:
Rodney: "Yes I'm half Jewish, and half Japanese. I was circumcised at Benihana's !!!"
Castration should be introduced as the only treatment for aids and be mandatory worldwide. It sounds mean, but I'll bet it would eliminate aids altogether within a few years at little expense to us, the taxpayers of the United States.
Thats the smartest comment I've read all day.
I wouldn't know, I'm not a man.
But I don't think the effect of friction is cumulative while nicotine in the bloodstream is. Too much friction just becomes uncomfortable.
So no, I don't think it's an apt analogy at all.
I do know it's late and I have to rouse the troops at 0600 so I'd better turn in.
Good night! GG
Not going to lay any pipe after using that.
G'nite!
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