So I was just reading a nifty article in ScienceDaily that says the surface of people’s tonsils, with their high levels of immune cells, may facilitate oral HIV/AIDS infection.
Last winter there was a big brouhaha over a finding that male circumcision substantially reduces HIV transmission. Which is great for those who are too stupid, irresponsible, uneducatable, or prohibited by social or moral “reasons” to use condoms, but otherwise highly inferior compared to, well, using condoms.
And putting two and two together I was wondering if we’d start to hear calls for pre-emptive tonsillectomies from the (largely judeo/christian/islamic, homophobic, and/or doesn’t reduce my enjoyment so go for it) groups that were endorsing compulsory circumcision earlier this year. (Note: many of the sources cited point to, but don’t necessarily support, the represented positions.)
But since it’s been a while I needed to go find a link. And while I was Googling around I ran across a remarkable new post from Kelly Jean Cogswell of A dyke abroad (It also appeared as an editorial in Gay City News)
Cut It Off – And Stop AIDS
By: KELLY JEAN COGSWELL
07/26/2007Women are dying of AIDS while some researcher bends over his penis, smiles at it fondly, and imagines what little alteration would make it an all-purpose tool safe to use again.
He’s not the only one with his dick in his hand. Each new report on male circumcision pumps up the protection believed to be provided by that little snip, snip so that pretty soon I expect to see the numbers not only show the procedure will stop HIV dead, but also reduce global warming, and maybe slow the Iraq war, too.
...
In the real world of South Africa, there’s very little difference in HIV rates between communities that snip, and those that don’t. In Northern Zambia, the difference only lasts until the young men move to the big city with its bright lights and Manolo Blahniks, metaphorically speaking.
Forgotten also are all the circumcised men in the States that dropped dead before ARV’s came on the scene. A foreskin more or less didn’t help them. Or don’t faggots count when you’re counting heads?
...
Women aren’t factored in at all except as a vector of disease. While millions of dollars are already pouring into circumcision programs even if only men have foreskins to whack off, women are struggling for equivalent funds for female condoms and microbicides – never mind programs with as vague a goal as girl power, the real key to HIV prevention.
It’s young women getting AIDS these days. UNAIDS says we already make up 60 percent of the 15 to 24-year-olds living with HIV/AIDS.
In sub-Saharan Africa girls of that age are three times more likely to be positive than their male peers. In the Caribbean it’s 2.5 times. Why? Because in most places we still don’t own our own bodies. Men think we’re dirt and they treat us that way.
...
It’s time for AIDS activists and researchers to shift their attention away from the penis and see the connection between hate and HIV and dead women. Only power will save us, not cuts, not even condoms unless we can make men wear them.
And if somebody still insists on tinkering around with men’s dicks to stop spreading HIV, maybe they should do a more comprehensive procedure, call it the Bobbitt and cut the whole thing off.
At last! Someone who can’t possibly be accused of mere anti-circumcisionism who’s nevertheless unimpressed by the yet-another-latest-and-greatest-bestest reason why we always have and always will need to circumcise men…
...but not, evidently, tonsillectomise them.
Whatever. Again, I’m not particularly fanatic about circumcision one way or another (for instance Circumcision may not impact sexual sensation, also from ScienceDaily, sounds perfectly plausible.)
It’s just that if it were any other body part but the foreskin, for far less than half the benefit of condom use, the conversation just wouldn’t be happening. Or certainly not happening under the same terms.
Submitted by 1516 (not verified) on Mon, 2007-07-30 10:02.
I know, I know I don't get banned. Lazy speech, sorry. I was trying to avoid putting four links in which I think you said put it straight into spam?
I don't think anyone has ever suggested that the research applies to anything other than heterosexual sex. The first articles seem to have been published in 1986/7 by the New England Journal of Medicine and both state heterosexual transmission.
I can't find any referecnce indicating whether anyone has investigated why it doesn't apply to gay men. And that in itself might be a point to make.
[I can think of a couple of reasons it might apply to gay men -- for instance it was long, long believed that sexual transmission occurred almost exclusively through receptive anal sex. And that became such settled news that it took a while for anyone (in the west, anyway) to recognize that in much of the (non-circumcised?) world it's primarily spread heterosexually. Thanks, A. --fl]
Submitted by 1516 (not verified) on Mon, 2007-07-30 05:35.
I don't know who was endorsing compulsory circumcision, but if they were endorsing it for the developed world, they couldn't have got it more wrong.
I could give you a number of links but I'd be banned by your spam trap, so I'll just give you one quote from The Lancet:
It cannot be overstated that male circumcision does not provide complete protection against HIV infection. Furthermore, circumcision as a public-health intervention is only appropriate in settings of high HIV prevalence. Volume 7, Number 5, May 2007
Kelly Jean Cogswell extrapolates from Africa to the US. She doesn't say where she gets her Zambia or South Africa information (and I can't find it) and dismisses controlled trials as being irrelevant. According to the UN "The first research proof came in 2005, when a study in South Africa, supported by the French Agence nationale de recherches sur le SIDA (ANRS) and known as the 'Orange Farm Intervention Trial', was stopped early in the face of evidence that the men who had been randomly assigned to be circumcised were getting 60% fewer HIV infections than the men assigned to the control group". Two further large and more recent trials in Kenya and Uganda have shown the same findings.
As for why more girls in sub-Saharan Africa are infected by AIDS, more baby girls are born HIV positive there and there could be various reasons for that. (And, sorry, that's my own blog but there are three references, buy one, get two free:)).
The sad thing is she has a good point, that women aren't getting the attention they should, but as far as I am concerned the arguments leading up to it detract from the whole.
[You don't get banned for posting multiple links, A. The system just requires me to manually approve those kinds of posts for publication.
As for Cogswell's main points, I think she was just firing all her cannons at once over the notion -- picked up on by the public if not expressly called for by health officials -- that circumcision makes everything better. Yes, she might miss the point picked up by a number of feminist advocates that circumcising men evidently lowered not only men's infection rates but lowered the rate of transmission to their partners even further. But her point that it first infected predominantly circumcised gay Americans, combined with what she argues is a strong tendency for promiscuous African husbands bringing infecting what she feels are largely monogamous wives, suggests that merely snipping those men without also either radically altering their behavior or providing proactive tools to their partners just isn't going to provide much long-term benefit. Thank you, A! --fl]