Nip and ...uck

Circumcision appears to reduce a man's risk of contracting AIDS from heterosexual sex by half, according to U.S. government health officials.

Because circumcision was working so well that continuing clinical trials would be unethical, the officials said Wednesday that they had stopped two of the trials in Africa.

AIDS experts immediately hailed the finding, and the directors of the U.S. and international funds for fighting the disease said they would now consider paying for circumcisions.

Uncircumcised men are thought to be more susceptible because the underside of the foreskin is rich in Langerhans cells, sentinel cells of the immune system, which attach easily to the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. The foreskin also often suffers small tears during intercourse.

But experts also cautioned that circumcision is no cure-all. It only lessens the chances that a man will catch the virus; it is expensive compared with condoms, abstinence or other methods, and the surgery has serious risks if performed by folk healers using dirty blades, as often happens in rural Africa.

Circumcision is "not a magic bullet, but a potentially important intervention," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of HIV/AIDS for the World Health Organization.

Sex education messages for young men need to make it clear that "this does not mean that you have an absolute protection," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, an AIDS researcher and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Circumcision should be used with other prevention methods, he said, and it does nothing to prevent spread by anal sex or drug injection, ways in which the virus commonly spreads in the United States, for example.

Twenty-two of the 1,393 circumcised men in the study caught the disease, compared with 47 of the 1,391 uncircumcised men. In Uganda, the reduction was 48 percent.

Those results echo the finding of a trial completed last year in Orange Farm, a township in South Africa, financed by the French government, which demonstrated a reduction of 60 percent among circumcised men.

So, the Jewish people had it right once again? Like the saying goes: "The Jews are the most optimistic people in the world... they cut off a piece even before knowing how big it's gonna be."[sorry about that]


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