12.03.08
HIV and circumcision
sciftp
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/scimedemail/la-oe-perchal3-2008dec03,0,7048138.story
HIV and circumcision
The circumcision rate has declined the U.S., but in Africa it is useful in HIV prevention.
My downstairs neighbor, eight months pregnant, recently stopped me in the elevator to share her dilemma about whether to have her baby boy circumcised. For a growing number of American parents today — particularly in urban centers like Los Angeles and New York — the decision to cut or not to cut is not the foregone conclusion it used to be.
Forty years ago, the circumcision rate for newborn boys in the United States was 85%; today, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, it’s about 56%, as more parents rethink whether circumcision is — or ever was–necessary.
In sub-Saharan Africa, attitudes are moving in the other direction. There, circumcision is gaining a hold in communities where historically it has not been practiced, and there is good reason for the shift.
Irrefutable evidence now shows that male circumcision can reduce the risk of heterosexual HIV transmission by as much as 64%. The findings were so dramatic that National Institutes of Health clinical trials were stopped early because researchers deemed it unethical to deny the procedure to men in the control groups.