AIDS Prevention Inspires Ways to Make Circumcisions Easier
The day of the assembly-line circumcision is drawing closer.
Now that three studies have shown that circumcising adult heterosexual men is one of the most effective “vaccines” against AIDS — reducing the chances of infection by 60 percent or more — public health experts are struggling to find ways to make the process faster, cheaper and safer.
The goal is to circumcise 20 million African men by 2015, but only about 600,000 have had the operation thus far. Even a skilled surgeon takes about 15 minutes, most African countries are desperately short of surgeons, and there is no Mohels Without Borders.
I posted on something similar a while back for some research I was doing. The protective benefits are certainly real and what was once perhaps a purely “stylistic” cultural trait may end up being functional after all — if, in fact, it had some functional backing to begin with — with a different distribution among various populations.
I can imagine what future archaeologists are going to make of these devices. . . .
One does wonder why they don’t just use a dorsal slit instead of complete removal, but never mind. The rings are similar to what I used to use on babies, and will make it easy for nursing assistants to do the trick.
And after working two years in sub Saharan Africa, I support this initiative: The hygiene problem is probably the reason for the practice in the first place.
And it’s interesting to speculate if the incidence of HIV is low in the Philippines, where “tuli” is still a custom despite the country being mainly Christian.link
Comment by tioedong — February 2, 2012 @ 4:25 pm