Circumcision, Fidelity More Effective HIV Prevention Methods Than Condoms, Abstinence, Researchers Say

Promoting male circumcision and fidelity to one partner seems to be more effective at curbing the spread of HIV than promoting abstinence and condom use, USAID researcher and technical adviser Daniel Halperin said last week, the Chicago Tribune reports. As Halperin and other researchers analyze 20 years of studies on HIV/AIDS throughout Africa, they have tried to "put aside intuitions, emotions, ideologies and look at the evidence in as coldhearted a way as we can," Halperin said. During a speech at a meeting of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society in Johannesburg, South Africa, Halperin said he and his colleagues discovered that regular sex partners rarely use condoms, and abstinence merely delays HIV infection among young people by one or two years. For example, condom use in Ghana and Senegal seems to have helped in the reduction of the spread of the HIV, which in those countries is particularly prevalent among commercial sex workers and their partners. However, condom use in South Africa and Botswana has had little effect in reducing those countries' HIV epidemics -- which have reached the general population -- because regular sex partners rarely use condoms consistently. In comparison, faithfulness to one partner has worked at reducing HIV prevalence in Uganda and Kenya, according to Halperin. Because a person is more likely to transmit HIV during the first three weeks of contracting the virus, an HIV-positive person who has just one partner during that time is likely to pass the disease to that one person. But if an HIV-positive person in the highly infectious stage has many sexual partners at a time, "the virus spreads like wildfire" as those people in turn have sex with other people, Halperin said. In addition, circumcision has been shown to reduce male-to-female HIV transmission by 60% to 75% (Goering, Chicago Tribune, 4/23). A study published in the November 2005 issue of PLoS Medicine of men living in South Africa finds that male circumcision might reduce the risk of men contracting HIV through sexual intercourse with women by about 60%. Male circumcision might also reduce the risk of HIV transmission from HIV-positive men to their female partners, according to a study of couples in Rakai, Uganda (Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report, 2/9).

wtf does circumcision have to do with transmitting/receiving AIDS? That makes no sense to me.

Laboratory studies have found that the foreskin is rich in white blood cells, which are favored targets of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. So the theory is that men who are uncircumcised are much more likely to contract the virus during sex with an infected woman, and that the epidemic spreads when these newly infected men have sex with other women within their network of sexual partners.

I think 11b may mean: It would be more reliable to circumcise every male in Africa, rather than making condoms freely available, to stop the spread of HIV.

I'm not. Only jews and perhaps muslims are circumsized. Probably has something to do with the climate there. It probably isn't nice to get desert sand cought behind your foreskin. Not much of a problem in the rainy forests of Germania.

I was born in Germany.