Judy Mandelbaum

Judy Mandelbaum
Brooklyn, New York, United States
June 01
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JANUARY 11, 2010 8:06AM

Male circumcision: A "short cut" to improved African health?

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Ugandan men 
Ugandan men wait in line to be circumcised

(source: Science Guardian) 


Routine male circumcision goes at least as far back as Abraham and simply refuses to die. In fact, a World Health Organization report from 2007 urging “that male circumcision now be recognized as an additional important intervention to reduce the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men” has led to a global renaissance of a practice that – justifiably or not – has been much maligned by activists in recent years. Other perceived benefits over the millennia have traditionally included protection from phimosis, general bacterial infection, penile cancer, cervical cancer in women, and of course masturbation (a biggie in the Victorian era). But no one could have anticipated the additional benefits it would bring to regions of Africa where the procedure was previously unknown.

Unlike female circumcision, the brutal excision of the female genitalia which is more accurately described as female genital mutilation, male circumcision is a fairly simple procedure that has been practiced throughout much of Africa for millennia for both ritual and hygienic reasons. In November 2008, the Kenyan government responded to the WHO recommendation by launching a massive nationwide male circumcision "rollout" aimed at circumcising 1.1 million men by 2013 (approximately 85 percent of Kenyan males have already undergone the procedure). It has concentrated its activities in Nyanza Province on the shores of Lake Victoria, where only about half of men between ages fifteen and forty-nine are circumcised and where the HIV/AIDS rate tops fifteen percent (President Obama’s father, a member of the Luo tribe, was born there). So far the government has trained over 700 health professionals to carry out the program and will soon be offering routine infant circumcision services as well. Around 75,000 Kenyan males have already taken advantage of the service.

What distinguishes the Kenyan crash program for adults from standard circumcision among Jews, Muslims, and Americans (aside from the critical issue of informed consent) is the way the government has linked the procedure to a medical check-up and basic health information. Candidates for the procedure are not only given a test for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, they also get a brief lookover by a doctor along with advice on safe sex practices, basic health, and sometimes even diet and lifestyles. In many cases, circumcisers represent the first doctors many of these men will ever have encountered.Rwanda, Uganda, and Botswana are instituting similar programs and South Africa is likely to follow suit.

However, such programs are not without risks. There is a very real danger that African men will expect too much from the “invisible condom” of circumcision and proceed to engage in even more dangerous behavior than before. Moreover, despite a series of regulations, there is still a possibility that the surgery will be performed by unskilled practitioners with all the health risks that entails. Nor should we ignore the issues of loss of sensation, pain, general dysfunction, and other complications that have kept the debate over “the circumcision decision” alive for decades. It's still hard to say whether this blind faith in a usually unnecessary surgical procedure represents "medical progress" or a return to the magical thinking that is behind so many of Africa's problems today.

But despite these concerns, Africa’s current embrace of male circumcision may well represent a “short cut” to better health for all people on the world’s poorest continent.

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One important factor you forgot to mention in the difference between the Kenyan circumcisions and circumcision as it is practiced among Jews, Muslims and many Americans is that the Kenyan circumcision candidates are adults, choosing (and capable of choosing) to modify their own bodies and to accept the risks of the operation.
Malusinka -
Yes, I think most people would agree that any surgical modification should require the person's consent.
80 boys died of tribal circumcision in Eastern Cape Province alone last year, so it's far from "simple". Rwanda? 3.5% of circumcised men there have HIV, compared with only 2.1% of non-circumcised, according to a National Health and Demographic Survey. (The same anomaly applies in at least six other African countries.) This at least needs explaining before mounting a mass-circumcision campaign there. And if "circumcisers represent the first doctors many of these men will ever have encountered", doesn't that suggest a peculiar set of priorities? And "one could have anticipated the additional benefits it would bring"? On the contrary, circumcision has been a "cure" looking for a disease - usually the most feared disease of the day - for over a century, and it was virtually inevitable that AIDS would join the long list. They hysterical enthusiasm for circumcision (for millenia) strongly suggests this is not a pure "disease-prevention" relationship. Something else is going on. You are right to stress informed consent, but yours is a voice in the wilderness.
I think that when you consider health care in thes tribal regions, it must be thought of in a different way to the way we see it here in the west. These people don't need microdermabrasion they need clean water and treatment for hiv.
My opinion on the matter is that Africa is a place where lots of unethical medical testing is done... People there have poor knowledge about medical procedures and if the doctor tells that the taking poison will cure AIDS, they will take a bottle of poison and drink it...


(formerly atheist)

Crazy as it sounds, I’ve stumbled on a blushy “hook” affording
a sudden, simultaneous mutual proving of
science - history -morality inviolving all religions, fully sincere,
experimental science, actually with the entire planet and all
recorded human history operating as control.

Surprise! I believe we’re being visited by surprisingly moral
beings (that match.) I believe they aim to prove
freedom - equality -brother/sisterhhood (love) are defined by
matched mathematical human / universal fabric, that defining
an original moral design.

I’ve taken an expansive view of religion which, with patience, need
not be found to contradict anyone’s traditional beliefs.

I’ve let religion resonate with current moral, historic and scientific

who, as foretold by the willingness to sacrifice Isaac, have
served a revelational historic function, was to prevent viral
degradation where that might defeat the proving of a match.

I am fully aware of parallels: Aztec, Mayan, Egyptian, Hebrew,
Roman Catholic anthologies, calendars, codes, even
city layouts.

These, because of their hemispheric separation, plus, frankly,
the absolute fact of not 1, not 3, but importantly 2 foreseen
personalities, have only served not to condemn religion but to confirm that glimpses from religion should resonate.


Pot smokers are scapegoated by drinkers, drinkers by fatty food eaters, and so on and so on.
Majority here. Minority there. Minority here, majority there.
Paranoia. Ego defense mechanisms. Transference (someone looks like someone who
was an obnoxious, paranoid, insulting, annoying, even threatening clown.)

Laughing all the way to the bank are the gay leaders of the religious right in the business of
taking any political foe, generally those taking frauds and monopolists to task, and associating themwith gays, the demonized. If anything the hypocritical gays resent the fear otherwise intended for
them. So those thereby afraid of being wrongly ferreted out as gay face a choice of sooner or later health
premium death spirals or "going naked," oil imports and a weak dollar, minimal mass transit,
paying for funds borrowed from abroad benefiting the ultra wealthy behind the Tea Party, water monopolies,
communications monopolies, etc.


It caused the propagation of gay GENETICALLY, so Hitler was feminine, the religious
right's leaders routinely prove being gay, virtually all murderers of gays
have proved being conflicted gays.

Associate any political foe with the demonized (and so most barbaric today,
simply make someone afraid of being wrongly ferreted out as gay--indeed,
somein Montana want it to be a status crime, just as in the Arab states.

To teach a universal lesson of freedom, equality and brotherhood / sisterhood to newly emergent apes, such that the complete prospect of deception based on paranoia, ego defense mechanisms, and transference could be understood, only the
heterosexual instinct itself was available as the basis of
scapegoating for profit.

That the hypocritical, often financially privileged, but most anti-socially GENETICALLY-PRODUCED gays, given to
let people murder, who do not care one iota about your children's future, are in the
business of sending the DEVELOPMENTALLY gay (optimal--served genetic numerical advantage FOR THE GROUP) to the lions, PROVES A SCIENCE, + THUS RELIGION.

Among much further more, I’ve proposed:
informational gravity and a commonality

of spin physics combining the physics of quasars with magnetic field in your hard drive (and specifically travel being possible in
data point to data point mode, though with Dr. Hoagland’s hyerdynamic space idea potentially helping with the idea of conduits,
unless, as is entirely possible, of course, this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KoR2t-iM9k&feature=related is a hoax.)

Said visitors may have imparted a simultaneous science - moral - history based
proof (all proving each other simultaneously, suddenly, or otherwise considered
as science proving morality and history, morality proving science and history,
history proving morality and science.)

Precisely with this happening: