Circumcision is considered not only to save men from AIDS virus but also protect them from some common sexually-transmitted diseases. Two new studies that have been presented at the world AIDS conference suggest that circumcision offer greater protection to men than thought.
Robert Bailey, a US researcher from the University of Illinois, Chicago presented long-term data from a trial in Kenya and in its early phase 2,784 uncircumcised uninfected men were enrolled.
Half of the men in the group were circumcised first and the others circumcised afterward and then they were tested for HIV later.
The outcomes of the earlier-published research from this trial showed that after two years, there were 59 percent lesser chances for circumcised men to contract HIV than uncircumcised counterparts.
While presenting the report at the 17th International AIDS Conference, Bailey told that the estimate of protectiveness at 24 months was adjusted to nearly 60% considering refined lab tests from blood samples.
At the 42-month mark, he reported, circumcision gave almost 65 percent of protectiveness.
The extension of the study that has been conducted among 1,739 out of 2,784 volunteers will be completed until December 2009.
The other study presented by the South African researcher Dirk Taljaard in which a well-known circumcision trail, at Orange Farm, South Africa, was reported.
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How could they carry on the study after they had offered the control group circumcision? Those who accepted would not be a random sample of the original population. More cautious, perhaps, and hence at less risk? (All the men had volunteered to be circumcised sooner or later, meaning they were not a random sample of the general population, either. This is only one of many reasons to be skeptical of the original studies. Another is the fact that 10% were lost from study, their HIV status unknown, several times as many as were known to be infected.)
And isn’t it getting a bit obvious that the same few researchers (Auvert, Bailey, Gray, Halperin) who are pushing circumcision as hard as they can, are the same ones who carried out all the studies claiming to show it is beneficial in every possible way? (Their study of sexual effects was so insensitive, it showed nearly 100% of the men enjoyed nearly 100% perfect sex! No wonder circumcision seemed to make no difference!) Something badly missing from all this is independent review, by people who weren’t avid circumcisionists before they ever started.
And what a coincidence that just when circumcision was falling out of favour, after more than a century of chasing whatever disease was most feared at the time (even masturbation was seriously believed to cause serious illness in the late 19th century), it’s “found” to be good against AIDS?
Something about circumcision (maybe just the fact that it’s very common, including among the people promoting it) seems to make people lose their critical faculties.