Circumsize This: No Proof that Circumcision Prevents HIV for Men Who Have Sex With Men

by Michael Jones · 2008-10-07 23:01:00 UTC
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I'm sure the site's editors are thinking, "What in the world is Mike going to use as a picture for this entry?"

I'll spare them that concern, and just get to the important medical news coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): there's no clear evidence to suggest that men who are circumcised have a lower risk of contracting HIV when having sex with other men. Preliminary studies conducted in Africa showed a 50-percent reduced HIV infection rate among circumcised men having heterosexual sex. But it looks like that evidence is not translating over to men who have sex with men.

Here's the study details:

A review of 15 studies involving 53,567 gay and bisexual men in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, India, Taiwan, Peru and the Netherlands failed to show a clear benefit for those who were circumcised, researchers from the U.S. government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

One more staggering statistic -- the CDC released numbers showing that of the 1.1 million people in the U.S. infected with HIV, 48 percent are men who have sex with men. That's nearly half a million people.

That's shocking.

Coincidentally, the French doctors who initially discovered the virus known as HIV were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine this week. It's a great recognition for them, but a somber reminder that more than twenty years after HIV was entered into the medical books, the epidemic continues to infect and kill at alarming rates.

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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