Circumcision as a means for fighting AIDS in Africa?
"This is an extraordinary development," said Dr. Kevin de Cock, director of the World Health Organization's AIDS department.
Heheheh. I generally consider myself an intactivist, but this one gives me some pause. Still, I think I lean on the side of scaling back abstinence-only education, coupled with a large birth control public relations campaign, before resorting to body modification. (thx, lorelei)
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This is great news. I am now going to have unprotected gay sex whenever I want! Take that other Carbone men and your uncircumcised penises.
Do some more studies and get back to me.
Also, Kevin de Cock? What are the odds?
Finally, why did one Carbone get the knife, while the others escaped?
The person who pointed me toward that article pointed out that the study seemed insufficient for the very big claims they are making about a causal link between circumcision and AIDS. There may be more to it than the article says, of course.
The way my parents tell it, they were sort of pressured by the doctor to do the job on LAA, and since they were relatively new to the US at the time, their English wasn't up to par to say otherwise.
Yeah, this is a tricky one. The public health sector does not have a great history with carrying out prevention measures on African bodies - like family planning initiatives that have ended with women unwittingly being sterilized. But there are actually a lot of studies dating back at least a couple years, that show a causal link re: circumcision. This study is just the most recent and has the best results - I've seen others that only give it a 25% efficacy.
It's sad but it's true. But American women love me, so thanks immigrant parents.
Personally, I'm biased toward male circumcision during infancy. Of course, I had the opposite experience of LAA -- my parents (not immigrants) were pressured by our doctor against having me circumcised when I was but a babe ... only to have my doctors reverse course when I was 15. I won't go into the reasons here -- suffice it to say that the surgery was absolutely necessary -- but I will note that I wouldn't want any child to endure what I did. (My apologies to those of you who were eating while reading this.)
My God. But still, I imagine that whatever you endured is probably rare, and not a large enough medical problem in of itself to force the necessity of the operation.
I vote for doing all options surgeries when babies are first born and just get it out of the way. Let's do circumcision, appendix, tonsils, adenoids and anything else we don't need... just chop them out and then we'll have to stuff done with before we're old enough to remember. It'll be great.
How did I know that when I clicked to see the comments, there would be my fiance bringing up the difference between himself and his brothers?
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