Bush Administration to fund male circumcision
We’ve post on this before, but male circumcision is getting more support from the Bush Administration as a prevention strategy in the fight against AIDS (see here and here). From today’s Washington Post:
Circumcision funding would be small at first, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for individual countries.
The cells in the foreskin of a penis are especially vulnerable to HIV, and removing the foreskin makes a man about 60 percent less likely to contract the virus, studies in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda have shown.
In Kenya, men from the Luo tribe, which does not circumcise its boys, have an HIV rate of 24 percent compared to a national rate of 7 percent. Kenya is among the nations preparing to expand circumcision services, Hill said. Some other African nations have reacted warily to the studies.
Most tribes in Africa once routinely circumcised boys in manhood rituals but the practice has declined in southern Africa, in part because of the influence of European missionaries who discouraged the practice as primitive.
The Bush administration had been reluctant to support circumcision services until there was broad international consensus on the issue.
Filed under: Politics and Policy
this is madness if you have your penis mutilated it will take twice as long to catch HIV and doing it to adults offers a lot less protection than that due to the nature of the thing
do we want peoople to catch HIV in 2 years rather than one?? This is not the answer in Africa there are hundreds of adult deaths from genital mutilation each year
the asnwer id retro virals condoms education common sense not this wotrthless dangerous occultic mutilation