<a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/05/when-bad-science-kills-or-how-to-spread-aids/&strip=1&vwsrc=0" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.pr...</a><p>Bill Gates doesn't seem to care that that science behind the project is terrible. It must have been pointed out to him, yet he was still promoting the project in 2015: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ovf8GYfNbw&t=40s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ovf8GYfNbw&t=40s</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFtSt862sKY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFtSt862sKY</a> - how much informed consent do you think was involved here?<p>A lawsuit against PSI Zimbabwe, also supported[1] by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation <a href="http://nehandaradio.com/2018/09/02/400-000-circumcision-lawsuit-family-sues-over-unsanctioned-sons-foreskin-removal/" rel="nofollow">http://nehandaradio.com/2018/09/02/400-000-circumcision-laws...</a><p>15,269,720 "voluntary medical male circumcisions" based on this bogus science <a href="http://www.aidsmap.com/PEPFAR-funded-15-million-medical-male-circumcisions-between-2007-and-2017/page/3343169/" rel="nofollow">http://www.aidsmap.com/PEPFAR-funded-15-million-medical-male...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.psi.org/2016/11/using-market-research-for-long-term-sustainability-of-vmmc-in-zimbabwe-and-zambia/" rel="nofollow">https://www.psi.org/2016/11/using-market-research-for-long-t...</a>
Basically I agree with this sentiment "So what should we conclude? Green et al. get it right: “Before circumcising millions of men in regions with high prevalences of HIV infection, it is important to consider alternatives. A comparison of male circumcision to condom use concluded that supplying free condoms is 95 times more cost effective.”"
The page currently times out loading, but from what I gather from the title, it seems that my distrust in the circumcicion against AIDS stories was on track.<p>It always felt a bit like puritans trying to find empiric evidence for their moral and cultural traditions.
<i></i>These is personal experience and views;<p>Male circumcision is prevalent in Africa mostly as as the norm. It is painless at childhood but gruesome when done to older kids. In some cultures around the world male circumcision is akin to piercing the ears of a baby girl for earrings.<p>In places where circumcision is a ritual, it gets done to older kids (early teens) as a rite of passage into adulthood. To me that will be more agonizing considering the awareness of the pain eg. when your dick gets caught in a zipper.<p>I personally dont find male circumcision at birth repugnant because I literally have no memory of it and I but I appreciate it was done to me appropriately.<p>According to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422680/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422680/</a><p>"The timing and reason for circumcision in boys or men vary across the continent. Circumcision is prevalent in as much as 93% of the countries in Northern Africa compared to 62% of countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Whereas the procedure is done for religious purposes in Western and Northern parts of Africa, it is seldom performed in neonates in Eastern and Southern regions of the continent where circumcision is, often, a rite of passage into adulthood"<p><i></i>What I'll love to see if the comparative AIDS footprint between countries with varying degrees of circumcision.
There is also the aspect of who has a dog in the fight and skin in the game.<p>When you have Americans telling Africans to get themselves circumcised you do have to wonder what is really going on, particularly when there is this dubious level of 'science'.<p>In the U.S. there is always the profit motive. Hence male circumcision is sold to parents as hygienic and beneficial, they go along with it and the hospital makes some money, everyone getting bonuses except for the baby boy.<p>To contrast with this profit-motive-situation you have places like the UK where healthcare is provided by the government - e.g. the NHS. The hospital has no financial incentive to circumcise as many boys as possible, doing so would be a cost, not a profitable thing, so it doesn't happen. Therefore the population ends up being un-circumcised as a general rule.<p>By adulthood men have had long enough to rationalise with what happened to their foreskin. If it has been removed then they tend to want this for others including their own boys. Meanwhile, those with intact foreskin don't talk about such matters in public as they know that open discussion will deeply hurt someone in the room who has been circumcised.<p>I think that this experiment to circumcise millions of African men for their own good would have been easier to get to the bottom of if everyone involved had to explain their viewpoint in just their 'birthday suit'.
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This piece from 2012 (posted now why?) loses all credibility in the section called "2. Misleading results":<p><i>It is tempting to think that the 60% figure that’s being thrown around in media reports is just too large a percentage to ignore–even if the studies had some flaws. But do you know what the “60%” statistic is actually referring to? Boyle and Hill explain: What does the frequently cited “60% relative reduction” in HIV infections actually mean? Across all three female-to-male trials, of the 5,411 men subjected to male circumcision, 64 (1.18%) became HIV-positive. Among the 5,497 controls, 137 (2.49%) became HIV-positive, so the absolute decrease in HIV infection was only 1.31%.</i><p><i>That’s right: 60% is the relative reduction in infection rates, comparing two very small percentages</i><p>I don't even know where to begin. What does he <i>think</i> people will interpret it to mean? His entire point here is made in bad faith. What he's saying basically comes down to "the infection rate in this trial was low to begin with, therefore there's no point trying to make it lower," which is preposterous. The authors claim a <i>reduction</i>, which any speaker of the English language should know how to interpret.<p>I think it's entirely valid to argue the validity of the study and the blowback issue, but his sloppy argumentation throughout the article is underscored here.
I am a 59 y/o male and an "Intactivist." Tomorrow morning, I'll be flying from my home in Kirkland, Washington, to Orlando, Florida, to join my colleagues in protesting non-therapeutic circumcision at the site where the AAP is hosting its convention. I routinely join the Bloodstained Men and their Friends in their various protests / education events. I also carry my various signs in front of a local hospital (Evergreen Hospital, Kirkland, WA) which performs NTC on healthy male infants and neonates when their parents request it. I also routinely speak against NTC in the public meetings of the Board of Commissioners for EGH.<p>I'm currently contemplating what kind of legal action I could take against the Board of Commissioners of the Public Hospital District that oversees the EvergreenHealth organization.<p>Over the last year, I have been sharing information with them. The management team of EGH has been relying on the AAP 2012 Circumcision Policy Statement as their justification for offering the harm they offer to parents. I have informed them that the Policy Statement expired in 2017, but they continue to defend the offering of this harm. I also submitted copies of a statement-by-statement refutation of the Policy Statement written by Dr. Robert S. Van Howe, who was (may still be) the Interim Chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the Central Michigan College of Medicine.<p>If anyone has any suggestions for me as regards what kind of legal action might be considered, to compel / encourage the Board of Commissioners to do the work necessary to decide for themselves whether they are harming healthy infants and neonates by continuing to offer this harm, I would appreciate it.
This article is FUD. If the article raised some questions about the (multiple) studies that show the effect, I would just shrug and let it go. But then to go on and say it "may increase it" is irresponsible. There is zero evidence for this -- and in fact a lot of evidence to the contrary. [1]<p>Yes, every study has limitations. The fact that you can't do a blind study or a placebo control with circumcision is just a fact of life -- people tend to know if they're circumcised or not. This does not refute the many studies' findings.<p>Can you imagine the outrage if the author published a paper questioning the effect of smoking on lung cancer, and then wondered if smoking actually reduces your chances for lung cancer? That's what this article is doing.<p>I'm glad that Gates is standing on the side of science here.<p>1. <a href="http://www.croiconference.org/sessions/impact-male-circumcision-scale-community-level-hiv-incidence-rakai-uganda" rel="nofollow">http://www.croiconference.org/sessions/impact-male-circumcis...</a>
> <i>After all, if someone knows (or thinks) that they’re getting a great big helping of medicine, they might act in various ways—whether consciously or unconsciously—that have the effect of generating positive health outcomes but which have nothing to do with the intervention itself.</i><p>That sounds strangely like the Hawthorne Effect[∆].<p>[∆]<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect</a>