September 22, 2006

That circumcision study was flawed

Bill Clinton's call for male circumcision as a preventative for AIDS, based on the outcome of a seriously flawed study of circumcised vs. genitally intact tea plantation workers, is deplorable. The controls of the study Clinton cites are appalling, ranging from clinical ethics violations to poor methodology.

The study is racist and would never be duplicated in populations in Europe or North America. The very idea of circumcising a mass population of Caucasian adults to keep them from not controlling themselves would be seen here as unconscionable.

Giving people the illusion that they are protected from HIV infection because they or their partner is circumcised undermines the most powerful means of prevention: education. How many will abandon effective methods of safer sex and HIV prevention armed with a false sense of security from circumcision? This and many other ethical factors are not accounted for in a rush to embrace questionable statistics.

James Loewen