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To Circumcise Or Not To Circumcise?
Posted by Administrator
Whatever your personal preference, a recent Australian study has shown having a circumcision snip may help protect you from HIV.
“We have shown for the first time that men who predominantly take on the insertive role in sex are less likely to contract HIV if they’ve been circumcised,” says David Templeton, from the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research in Sydney.
But if you’ve had the snip, HIV educators are advising not to throw away your condoms just yet. Worried the recent findings will encourage gay men to have unsafe sex if they’ve been circumcised, Templeton says the findings are about “a risk reduction for a small group of men who didn’t have a huge risk in the first place.”
Recruiting 1,400 HIV-negative men for the study, two thirds of whom were circumcised, researchers tracked the men over a four year period. When the study concluded, 53 of the men had developed HIV.
Only 7 of the 53 cases were among insertive partners, and researchers believe 5 of these cases could have been avoided if the men were circumcised. Circumcision is believed to help prevent HIV transmission because it removes foreskin that is more prone to lesions, and therefore allowing the virus access to the body.
But Templeton says the figures need to be viewed in context. “That’s only nine percent of all HIV infections overall that can be attributed to being uncircumcised, not enough to advocate throwing out condoms or advocating widespread circumcision,” he says.
Presented at an HIV conference in Perth this week, the findings come among others that indicate using Viagra and the drug ice may increase the risk of HIV infection. “The drugs that were independently associated with seroconversion are the drugs that enhance sexual pleasure like amyl nitrate, crystal and Viagra,” says Dr Garrett Prestage from the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research.
Despite the findings, Prestage believes a recent rise in HIV among gay men isn’t about drug use and possible links to failure to make safe choices. “It’s not about men getting out of it and screwing up, making mistakes, as everyone seems to think…It’s not because they take drugs that they become infected. It’s because these men are into taking risks in general, whether it be with sex or with drugs” says Prestage. But Prestage also qualified the study’s findings by saying that this ‘risk taking’ group among gay men isn’t representative of the entire community. “We need to be targeting our messages to the men who play in more sexually adventurous scenes where risks with both drugs and sex are common,” says Prestage.
If you want to know about this subject please click on this link: http://www.avert.org, It will lead you to AvertT which is an international HIV and AIDS charity based in the UK, working to AVERT HIV and AIDS worldwide.
