World Health Org sez: Snip It! Snip It Good!

[-Jrabbit]

From bbc.co.uk...

WHO agrees HIV circumcision plan

The World Health Organization and UNAIDS said circumcision should be added to current interventions to reduce the spread of HIV.

Three African trials have shown that circumcision halved the rate of HIV infection in heterosexual men.

The recommendations largely apply to countries where rates of heterosexual transmission is high.

Experts warned that greater use of circumcision would not replace the need for other prevention methods, such as condoms.

But modelling studies have shown that if male circumcision was more widely available, millions of lives, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa would be saved.

WHO and UNAIDS said access to the procedure should be urgently scaled up in areas with high rates of heterosexual infection and low rates of male circumcision.

But warned that it was an additional intervention and would not replace programmes providing HIV testing, or prevention or treatment for sexually infected infections.

Men and their partners must also be given counselling to prevent them developing a false sense of security, they said.

Training and monitoring must be done to check circumcision is being done by appropriate health professionals in a sanitary environment with proper equipment.

And they stressed there was no evidence yet as to whether circumcision has any impact on the risk of infection for the woman or on the risk among men who have sex with other men.

Significant step

Kevin De ****, director of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization said: "The recommendations represent a significant step forward in HIV prevention."

"Countries with high rates of heterosexual HIV infection and low rates of male circumcision now have an additional intervention which can reduce the risk of HIV infection in heterosexual men."

However, he said it would be years before the impact on the epidemic would be apparent.

Catherine Hankins, UNAIDS, said: "Being able to recommend an additional HIV prevention method is a significant step towards getting ahead of this epidemic.

"However, we must be clear: male circumcision does not provide complete protection against HIV.

"Men and women who consider male circumcision as an HIV preventive method must continue to use other forms of protection such as male and female condoms, delaying sexual debut and reducing the number of sexual partners."

All three African trials were stopped early because the results were so dramatic - with reduced rates of new HIV infections of 48-60%.

There are several reasons why circumcision may protect against HIV infection.

Specific cells in the foreskin may be potential targets for HIV infection and also the skin under the foreskin becomes less sensitive and is less likely to bleed reducing risk of infection following circumcision.

When Aids first began to emerge in Africa, researchers noted that men who were circumcised seemed to be less at risk of infection but it was unclear whether this was due to differences in sexual behaviour.

Deborah Jack, chief executive of the National AIDS Trust, said: "These recommendations address many of the benefits of including male circumcision in a comprehensive HIV prevention package.

She added: "Additional research to determine the health impact for women and men who have sex with men is vital, as is ensuring that adequate resources are provided to fund existing prevention methods, as well as continue research into new technologies such as microbicides and vaccines."

[Guynemer]

Oh no...

[Drake Tungsten]

Oh no...

Asher in 5... 4... 3...

[DRoseDARs]

Drake, he likes them bigger. You're counting in the wrong direction.

[Dis]

I knew I forgot to post something. I tire of participating in these threads.

But it's alway fun because Asher likes to talk about penises.

[-Jrabbit]

Kevin De C0ck, director of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization...

Stuff like this... you just can't make up.

[Asher]

There's already been a thread on this.

I'm all for circumcising the kids in Africa if it helps to prevent the spread of HIV. But I think if you circumcise your kid in North America with the goal of preventing HIV, you should be sterilized.

[Dis]

Originally posted by -Jrabbit


Stuff like this... you just can't make up.

with a name like that, your future is limited.

[Guynemer]

Originally posted by Dis


with a name like that, your future is limited.

On that topic, there is currently a girl in the NICU with the first and middle name Paris Nicole.




I will do anything to preemptively threadjack this from turning into yet another circ screaming match.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Let's hope that....

1- the circumcisions aren't performed in traditional group ceremonies using one, unsterilised blade.

2- the recipients don't start thinking they're invulnerable.

...or this could end up counter-productive. Condoms need to be promoted.

[Drake Tungsten]

Promotion of condom usage hasn't been as successful at stopping the spread of AIDS as one would think...

HIV's resilience

International experts long regarded Botswana as a case study in how to combat AIDS. It had few of the intractable social problems thought to predispose a country to the disease, such as conflict, abject poverty and poor medical care. And for the past decade, the country has rigorously followed strategies that Western experts said would slow AIDS.

With its diamond wealth and the largesse of international donors, Botswana aggressively promoted condom use while building Africa's best network of HIV testing centers and its most extensive system for distributing the antiretroviral drugs that dramatically prolong and improve the lives of those with AIDS.

But even though the relentless pace of funerals began to ease in recent years, the disease was far from under control. The national death rate fell from the highest in the world, but only to second-highest, behind AIDS-ravaged Swaziland. Men and women in Botswana continued to contract HIV faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

Twenty-five percent of Batswana adults carry the virus, according to a 2004 national study, and among women in their early 30s living in Francistown, the rate is 69 percent.

Researchers increasingly attribute the resilience of HIV in Botswana — and in southern Africa generally — to the high incidence of multiple sexual relationships. Europeans and Americans often have more partners over their lives, studies show, but sub-Saharan Africans average more at the same time.

Nearly one in three sexually active men in Botswana reported having multiple, concurrent sex partners, as did 14 percent of women, in a 2003 survey paid for by the U.S. government. Among men younger than 25, the rate was 44 percent.

The distinction between having several partners in a year and several in a month is crucial because those newly infected with HIV experience an initial surge in viral loads that makes them far more contagious than they will be for years. During the three-week spike — which ends before standard tests can even detect HIV — the virus explodes through networks of unprotected sex.

This insight explained what studies were documenting: Africans with multiple, concurrent sex partners were more likely to contract HIV, and countries where such partnerships were common had wider and more lethal epidemics.

A model of multiple sexual relationships presented at a Princeton University conference in May showed that a small increase in the average number of concurrent sexual partners — from 1.68 to 1.86 — had profound effects, connecting sexual networks into a single, massive tangle that, when plotted out, resembles the transportation system of a major city.

Circumcision a factor

A second key factor helping the virus spread through southern Africa is low rates of circumcision. Before European colonialists arrived, most tribes in the region removed the foreskins of teenage boys during manhood rituals. Those rites, which were discouraged by missionaries and other Westerners who regarded them as primitive, have gradually declined as the region rapidly modernized.

Dozens of studies, including three experimental trials conducted in Africa in recent years, show that circumcised men are much less likely to contract HIV because the most easily infected cells have been removed.

These factors, researchers say, explain how North Africa, where Muslim societies require circumcision and strongly discourage sex outside monogamous and polygamous marriages, has largely avoided AIDS. They also explain why the epidemic is far more severe south of the Sahara, where webs of multiple sex partners are more common, researchers say.

West Africa has been partially protected by its high rates of circumcision, but in southern and eastern Africa — which have both low rates of circumcision and high rates of multiple sex partners — the AIDS epidemic became the most deadly in the world.

"That's the lethal cocktail," said Harvard University epidemiologist Daniel Halperin, a former AIDS-prevention adviser in Africa for the U.S. government. "There's no place in the world where you have very high HIV and you don't have those two factors."

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003624123_botswanahiv18.html

[RGBVideo]

Snipping your kid makes sense if you predict your kid will have unprotected sex with a lot of people infected with HI-virus.

2- the recipients don't start thinking they're invulnerable.

The whole Africa already does, that's why HIV is so prevalent in the first place.

[Sandman]

Why aren't we 'snipping' the girls as well? I'll bet that works even better at containing HIV.

[Dis]

no it doesn't

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by VJ
Snipping your kid makes sense if you predict your kid will have unprotected sex with a lot of people infected with HI-virus.

... which, in much of Africa, would be an eminently sensible prediction.