Good news in the fight against AIDS!
WindingHighway
John Lauerman, Bloomberg
Published: Saturday, August 02, 2008
On a typical day, Robert Bailey has 20 to 30 men waiting to be
circumcized at his clinic in Kisumu, Kenya. The men are enduring the
pain because they don't want to get AIDS.
Since a study by Bailey in 2006 found the operation drops the HIV
infection rate in men by 60 per cent, the procedure most often
performed at birth has become a popular elective surgery among grown
men in southern Africa.
The push has been fuelled by $16 million from the U.S. for clinics,
personnel and procedures, funding expected to double this year, and
$10.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The operation, in which skin covering the end of the penis is removed,
may help lower infections among men of the traditionally uncircumcized
Luo tribe by more than two-thirds, to five per cent, said Bailey, who
runs the Nyanza Reproductive Health Society Clinic. Widespread use
could prevent 5.7 million African infections and three million deaths
over 20 years, according to the United Nations.
"It sounds stranger than fiction," said Kevin DeCock, director of
HIV/AIDS at the UN's World Health Organization in Geneva. "Surgery to
protect against an infectious disease is such an unfamiliar concept."
Researchers and advocates will discuss how to promote circumcision at
the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City next week, where
more than 25,000 will gather.
AIDS experts are looking for cost-effective, reliable ways to reduce
2.7 million HIV annual infections. HIV vaccines and preventive gels
have failed and some have even appeared to raise infection rates, and
while condoms are effective, they work only when people have and use
them, said Daniel Halperin, a Harvard School of Public Health
researcher in Boston.
'One-time investment'
"Circumcision is a one-time investment, highly effective, and may make
much more of an impact than any of these measures," he said in a
telephone interview.
Bailey, a 61-year-old American, says he wants to overcome traditional
ethnic views of circumcision.
While the Luo Council of Elders, an advisory body that can sway public
opinion on religious and cultural issues, doesn't oppose circumcision,
it has said a campaign encouraging the procedure would be
inappropriate.
"We need to emphasize that circumcision isn't being promoted for
reasons of culture and religion, but just medicine and health," he
said.
Bailey, an anthropologist and epidemiologist at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, endured 15 years of ridicule for his pet project,
he said. People laughed openly when he gave a talk on the topic in
Entebbe, Uganda, in 1998.
"I'd present my data and people would act like 'That's a quaint idea,
let's move on,"' he says. "Now that we have the evidence that
circumcision works, young men are actively seeking the services."
The Luo tribe is Kenya's third-largest, with more than three million
living in western Kenya. After opening his clinic in 1997, Bailey
started charging about $5 for the service and now does it free. About
65 per cent of young men in the region are unemployed, he said.
Nick Owuor, a 21-year-old Luo from Kisumu, said he had the five-minute
procedure in Bailey's clinic this month to ward off sexually
transmitted infections.
"The pain was pretty severe for about an hour," Owuor said. "But it's
worth it."
In 1995, Bailey stumbled on a 10-year-old study suggesting circumcized
men were less likely to catch HIV from prostitutes.
He spent years trying to prove a link, and says he thinks it can save
millions of men in Africa, where about 22 million of the world's 33
million people infected with the AIDS virus live.
The pocket between the foreskin and the tip of the penis gives viruses
and bacteria a spot to grow, and circumcision eliminates it. The
foreskin has also been shown in studies to be rich cells that carry
HIV into the body, said Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Since Bailey's 2006 study, more African health leaders are trying to
raise circumcision rates, said Agnes Binagwaho, executive secretary of
Rwanda's National Commission to Fight AIDS, in an interview last month
at the UN in New York.
"In our culture, there was no male circumcision," Binagwaho said. "Now
the information is out there and people are demanding it."
ratsalad
brainwashing them and mutilating them how dumb can people be my god
"WindingHighway" <winding...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:a6fac3d2-0a2f-4ae4...@m45g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
ratsalad
"WindingHighway" <winding...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:a6fac3d2-0a2f-4ae4...@m45g2000hsb.googlegroups.com...
Jake Waskett
> see for yourself http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/vanhowe4/
It amazes me that anyone would refer to that paper, given the severe
methodological errors. See:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10726934
http://circs.org/library/moses2/index.html
WindingHighway
> On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:04:11 -0700, ratsalad wrote:
>
> It amazes me that anyone would refer to that paper, given the severe
> methodological errors
Not to mention that its also ten years out of date, and so excludes
all the most important research on the topic!
But if they dont have a real argument, they use whatever junk they can
lay your hands on, and mindlessly copy and paste it. This is classic
anti-circ behavior, seen here over and over again.
Your recent expose of the outright lies in Mothering Magazine -- which
of course does not permit any corrections -- is another example.
Jack
------------------------------------------------------------------
But the lie that "babies don't feel pain" doesn't bother you a bit.
Jake Waskett
> On Aug 7, 9:31�am, Jake Waskett <j...@waskett.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:04:11 -0700, ratsalad wrote:
>> > see for yourselfhttp://www.cirp.org/library/disease/HIV/vanhowe4/
>>
>> It amazes me that anyone would refer to that paper, given the severe
>> methodological errors
>
> Not to mention that its also ten years out of date, and so excludes all
> the most important research on the topic!
Undeniably true, but since it was invalid even at the time of publication,
it seemed a less important point. :-)
> But if they dont have a real argument, they use whatever junk they can
> lay your hands on, and mindlessly copy and paste it. This is classic
> anti-circ behavior, seen here over and over again.
Sad but true. It's all very familiar.
> Your recent expose of the outright lies in Mothering Magazine -- which
> of course does not permit any corrections -- is another example.
But fortunately that's only a magazine aimed at laypeople. I wouldn't say
that it's harmless - I oppose publication of any dishonest material - but
it's not as damaging as an erroneous paper in a scientific journal, where
one would ordinarily expect scientific values to be upheld.