Male Circumcision Doesn’t Cut Your HIV Risk
July 19, 2009 by Peggy Rowland
Filed under Women's Health
A recent trial to see if circumcision helped protect both men and women from HIV was halted after researchers learned the benefit is one-sided.
The study, published in Lancet medical journal, shows that while circumcision could help protect men from HIV, it doesn’t help women. However, researchers note that women may also benefit indirectly via reduced rates of HIV among men.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and their colleagues in Uganda studied 922 uncircumcised, HIV-infected men and 163 wives or female sex partners of the men. Some of the men studied were immediately circumcised, while others waited for two years.
The study found that circumcision didn’t reduce HIV transmission to females over a period of 24 months. Researchers believe that condom use remains essential for reducing the spread of AIDS. Read more about this study at msnbc.
(Image via stock.xchng)
The men were all already HIV+ so this trial told us nothing about the risk to them. 18% of the partners of the circumcised men got infected, compared to 12% of the partners of non-circumcised, but they cut the trial short before it reached statistical significance. (They cut short the trials that claimed to show circumcision protects men, too.) So for all we know circumcision INcreases the risk to women, and it’s doubtful whether it protects men.
Hugh, the researchers believe that circumcision helps protect men, though maybe this study didn’t prove it. Here’s a quote from the CBS article I linked to:
“The foreskin of the penis, which is removed during circumcision, is rich in cells that are particularly easy for the virus to infect. The theory is that removing this source of vulnerable cells makes infection more difficult.”
The fact is that those cells are everywhere: “Langerhans cells, along with other classes of dendritic cells, are universally found in all skin. There is minimal variation between parts of the body in their content of Langerhans cells. They are found in all genital tissue including the glans, foreskin, shaft, scrotum, clitoris, clitoral hood, labia, and vagina.”
But before anyone tries to explain why circumcision protects, they need to establish that it does. In the randomised controlled trials on which this claim is based, several times as many circumcised men dropped out, their HIV status unknown, as non-circumcised men were infected. So it’s quite possible that circumcision doesn’t protect at all.