You see it all over twitter and the news, Circumcision reduces a man’s chance of getting HIV by 60% or more. But does anyone really research what that 60% entails? I know Circumstitions.com has a very detailed graph that shows what it means, but apparently that isn’t good enough for people who want to cling to the belief that slicing off a baby’s foreskin is more effective than telling him to use condoms when he’s older. Well, that along with the circumfetishists who want this unnecessary procedure to continue for their own perverted agenda.
Anyway, I started thinking about a way that I can say it simply that even a child could understand. I’m good with math, so I thought I’d give it a try. I’ll try to break this down as basic as possible.
Let’s say we have 10,000 men and half are cut and half are intact. So that’s 5,000 of each. The intact men are told to go out and have sex as much as they want. They aren’t given any condoms or education, only told to go about life as they normally would.
On the other hand the 5,000 men who opt for circumcision have 6 weeks of healing time, where they are told about safe sex and are given condoms and other educational material.
To keep this simple, let’s ignore the hundreds of men who acquired HIV and dropped out of the study. For simplicity let’s say they all stuck with it and 184 of those men caught HIV. That is 1.8% of the 10,000 men (or less than 2 men for every 100, which means that almost 98 of those 100 didn’t get HIV, regardless of their foreskin status). Of those 184 men, 59 were circumcised and 125 were intact. Remember though that the intact men didn’t have healing time from surgery nor were they told about safe sex.
Focusing on those 184 men who came down with HIV, 68% were intact (125 / 184). THAT is the much hyped 60% – 70% decrease, which falsely assumes that if those 125 men had been circumcised, none of them would have acquired HIV. Considering that 32% of the HIV+ men did in fact acquire HIV even with the circumcision, education and condoms, pretty much proves that at least 32% of those intact men (40 of them) would still have caught HIV had they been circumcised. So 99 (59 + 40) of all the men (1%) would STILL have acquired HIV. Now take that 1.25% of intact men who acquired HIV against the 1% of cut men who theoretically would have still acquired HIV, that’s only a fourth of one percent difference.
It pretty much boils down to the fact that 5,000 men lost their foreskins, and it didn’t even protect all of them from getting HIV. Even education and condoms didn’t protect them from it. Just imagine how fewer men would have acquired HIV had the intact men been instructed to use condoms and practice safe sex. Chances are that the cut men would have outnumbered the intact with infections.
To compound the inaccuracy of these studies, the circumcised men were catching up with the intact men, and that is when the “scientists” decided to cut the studies short. It can be assumed that the cut men grew tired of using condoms, since that is the only real protection against HIV other than abstinence. It was then they started acquiring HIV at the same rate as their intact counterparts.
One last thing I feel compelled to point out is that none of the African studies took into consideration that any of those men (cut or intact) were acquiring HIV through non-sexual transmission, and many of them were.
To summarize:
1.8% of all the men in the study acquired HIV (184 / 10000)
1.25% intact men acquired HIV of all the men (125 / 10000) or 2.5% of only the intact men (125 / 5000)
0.64% circumcised men acquired HIV of all the men (64 / 10000) or 1.3% of only the cut men (64 / 5000)
Actual difference between 1.25% and 0.64% equals 0.61% (1.25 – .64 = .61 which is less than 1%) reduction in the chances of acquiring HIV with circumcision, condoms and education. Even subtracting the 1.3% from 2.5% is just over 1%.
Basically 100 men would need to be circumcised to protect 1 man from POSSIBLY acquiring HIV, which could be prevented if that 1 man used a condom and/or maintained a monogamous relationship.
Is that really worth torturing newborn babies for?
There is so much more to these so-called “studies” than meets the eye.
I’d like to bring attention to some of what people may not know from looking at these “studies” or that magical 60% figure people keep bandying about.
1. Circumcision wasn’t discovered yesterday.
Circumcision advocates would like to convince their audience that circumcision is this “new and innovative technology.” At the same time they’d like them to believe that circumcision is this “age-old tradition” that has been practiced “for thousands of years.” So which is it?
2. Circumcision “research” isn’t new.
The idea that “circumcision might prevent disease” is not a brand new concept. Circumcision “researchers” have been trying to establish a connection between circumcision and the prevention of some disease for a little over a century. Circumcision started out as an attempt to cure masturbation, because masturbation was believed to be the origin of a myriad of diseases. Circumcision, advocates posited, would prevent masturbation, and thus all associated disease, which included but was not limited to bed wetting, epilepsy, cancer, asthma, spermatorhea (not even a real disease), etc.
3. Circumcision “researchers” aren’t without their conflicts of interest.
Circumcision and its “research” does not exist in a vacuum. “Researchers” did not wake up one day and decided “today is a good day to prevent disease with circumcision.” A look into the “researchers” behind all the circumcision “study” reveals that they all have competing interests in establishing a link between circumcision and the prevention of some disease. “Researchers” may actually belong to a culture where circumcision is an accepted social norm, for example. They might belong to a religion where circumcision is considered to be a divine commandment. The researchers may themselves be circumcised, or be married to circumcised spouses, and/or be parents to circumcised children. The fact of the matter is that circumcision has been a controversial subject, even since biblical times, and “researchers” may be feigning an interest in disease prevention, when their true convictions lie in vindicating a practice that is ever under scrutiny.
A background search reveals that there is a great deal of “researchers” who are American, for example, where 80% of the male population is circumcised, and the rate of infant circumcision is dwindling. One would find that there is a disproportionate number of “researchers” who happen to be Jewish, where Judaism requires that male children born to adherents be circumcised on their 8th day of life. One would find that circumcision, not disease prevention, takes up a great deal of these so-called “researchers’” time. One would find that this “discovery” of a “reduced rate of HIV in circumcised men” is no mere coincidence.
If one takes the time to investigate the circumcision debate, one would find that the longest standing argument in the intactivist side is ethics. And yet two decades into the circumcision/HIV “research,” circumcision “researchers” decide that ethics was important; once they found their desired results that is.
One of these “studies” biggest problems is that they were ended early, ostensibly because continuing them (but not starting them in the first place?) would be “unethical.” Other research has shown that ending studies early tends to skew the results, not to mention the fact that the circumcised men were told to abstain from sex for 6 weeks, giving them a head start in the HIV prevention race.
Upon ending the studies, they offered the remaining intact men circumcision. (Because why not? It’s so effective, right?) This would seem noble of the “researchers” that they ended their “studies” early, but this argument masks something a bit more sinister than this. In circumcising the rest of the men in the study, in essence, the “researchers” were covering their tracks; they’ve eliminated their control group, thereby rendering any future follow up impossible. And, by claiming “ethics,” they’ve made it so that no other groups of scientists could conduct similar “studies” in order to confirm the results.
The laws of science dictate that for a claim to be true, it must be consistently and repeatedly reproducible. In essence, the WHO has endorsed male circumcision as HIV prevention using claims that, due to the argument of “ethics,” are not scientifically verifiable.
There are many other problems with these “studies,” but I’m going to end by highlighting its most fundamental flaw: The “studies” were not placebo-controlled, and they were not double-blinded.
Circumcision advocates like to claim that the “studies” carried out in Africa are the end-all be-all of circumcision/HIV “research” because they were “randomized controlled trials,” and quote/unquote follow “the gold standard” of scientific research. This would only be true *IF* the sample was truly randomized, *IF* the studies were double-blinded and only *IF* the studies were actually controlled, not to mention the fact that, due to claims of ethical concerns, the results will never be confirmed.
The men in the studies were paid recruits, which means that already a specific group of men is being attracted. There is no way to hide the fact, from the researchers, nor from the participants, who is circumcised, and who is not. You can’t placebo a surgery, which means there was not, nor could there ever be, a control. The very nature of circumcision is such that true randomized controlled trials would be unethical, if not impossible. If it was “unethical” to continue, it should have been “unethical” to have ever even begun in the first place.
The circumcision trials in Africa are a complete fabrication. Diverting funds from conclusively proven modes of disease prevention, not to mention other needed basic necessities like food and water, these “studies” an obnoxious hoax perpetrated by circumcision advocates with an agenda. They are so obviously fundamentally flawed, and are a scientific scandal waiting to happen.
The day will come when this farce will collapse and the United States and the WHO will have to apologize to the people of Africa a la Guatemala, for once again, using them as live human guinea pigs.
Wow, thanks for such detailed feedback! Much appreciated.
This could be polished into the best summary of the African clinical trials I have ever encountered.
The trials were ended after only 6 months, supposedly because the “overwhelming” evidence made it unethical to withhold circumcision from the control group. The substantially lower rate of HIV acquisition in the treatment group can largely be explained by three facts:
1. Men recovering from adult circ often cannot enjoy sex. Moreover, the treatments were told to abstain from sex for 6 weeks.
2. The treatments were given free condoms; the controls were not.
3. The treatments got an anti-AIDS lecture; the controls did not.
(2) and (3) were blatantly unethical, in my view. Giving condoms to the treatments but not the controls was especially disturbing.
Just as the treatments were catching up with the controls, the trials were cut short after a mere 6 months. This ruled out investigating the possibility that circumcision only delays the inevitable. The trials should have run at least 5 years, and preferably 10. I bet the percentages of treatments and controls who were HIV positive would have significantly converged.
Now excuse me as the fun level of my comment declines. If the numbers of treatments and controls are the same, we say the design is “balanced” and we can talk about raw numbers of HIV positives, not just percents. My recollection of the African studies (feel free to take exception with me) is that the number of cut men who were HIV+ was 40% of the number of intact men who were; hence the claim that circ was 100%-40% or “60% effective.”
The denominators of the last ratios you show in your post should be 5000, not 10,000, and the corresponding percentages should therefore double to 2.5% and 1.28%. Even so, by the reasoning of the previous paragraph, circumcision would be “49% effective against AIDS.”
Hmmm…I’ll have to take a look at my numbers. I didn’t think I mixed up the 5K and 10K. But I was showing how many of the total men caught HIV in each of the groups. So it wasn’t 125 out of the 5000 men. That was 125 out of all 10,000. But any percentage “effective against AIDS” is exaggerated since it is based on the difference of a handful of men. Even 49% effective wouldn’t be a fair statement, since there was only a 1% difference between HIV+ and HIV-.
But thank you for your feedback. Just goes to show why so many people believe that those studies prove something that they do not.
Edit: I did go back in and put both comparisons of the percentage of the 5000 and the 10000 cut and intact men.
It still rounds up/down to 1% difference. 
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