Nip the tip
posted by saurabh in Biology, Health!, Il Mundo |In the “Stuff you can’t make up” department, the head of the WHO’s HIV/AIDS program, which today announced that men should be circumcised in order to reduce their chance of getting HIV by 60%, is named Kevin De Cock.
I’m not sure how I feel about the recommendation myself. Actually, I can tell you that my immediate reaction was anger, before I read the study, which makes it clear that the effect is almost certainly real (that is, attributable directly to the circumcision and not attendant factors). It seems risky in the extreme to pin a lot of emphasis on something with a relatively modest effect if it’s only going to result in more risk-taking behavior. It’s also not cheap at all to circumcise everyone in sub-Saharan Africa (it costs $50-100 a slice), which means it’s arguably a big waste of money as well. But maybe they know what they’re talking about - I’m not a public health specialist.
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What are they going to do with all those foreskins?
Mmm, calamari.
Mist, I think it’s traditional to make turn them into wallets. . .
Saurabh, I’m surprised at your reaction. I thought it was common knowledge that this had been lately but fairly firmly established and that people were trying to spread the information and the implementation. At last year’s Toronto AIDS conference, UN Envoy Stephen Lewis made it his third point at the keynote. (Cntrl-F for Lewis.)
It’s not something I follow especially closely - I don’t recall hearing about this research before. I’m not sure what public health criteria are used to decide on a particular campaign, and maybe this is enough. The projection based on a 60% reduction in transmission to men is 6 million fewer HIV cases in 20 years. That seems like a lot, and maybe it’s for lack of any better idea that this one is being pressed, but it also seems relatively tenuous that it would work as intended - I don’t know that the sociological aspects of this are as well-studied, and that could go badly wrong.