Circumcising men routinely across Africa could prevent
millions of deaths from AIDS,
World Health Organization
researchers and colleagues reported.
They analyzed data from trials that showed men who
had been circumcised had a significantly lower risk
of infection with the AIDS virus, and calculated that
if all men were circumcised over the next 10 years,
some two million new infections and around 300,000
deaths could be avoided.
Researchers believe circumcision helps cut infection
risk because the foreskin is covered in cells the
virus seems able to easily infect. The virus may also
survive better in a warm, wet environment like that
found beneath a foreskin.
So if men were circumcised, fewer would become infected
and thus could not infect their female partners.
The human immunodeficiency virus or
HIV, which causes AIDS, now infects close to
40 million people and has killed another 25 million.
It mostly affects sub-Saharan Africa and the main
mode of transmission is sex between a man and a woman.
Several studies have suggested that men who are circumcised
have a lower rate of HIV infection. This has been
especially noticeable in some parts of Africa, where
some groups are routinely circumcised while neighboring
groups are not.
Last year, Dr. Bertran Auvert of the French National
Research Agency INSERM and colleagues at WHO found
that circumcised men in South Africa were 65 percent
less likely to become infected with the deadly and
incurable virus.
His team then did an analysis to see what would happen
if all African men were circumcised.
"In West Africa, male circumcision is common and
the prevalence of HIV is low, while in southern Africa
the reverse is true," they wrote in the current report,
published in the Public Library of Science Medicine.
"This analysis shows that male circumcision could
avert nearly six million new infections and save three
million lives in sub-Saharan Africa over the next
twenty years," they wrote.
Overall, they project that universal male circumcision
would reduce the rate of infections by about 37 percent.
"Male circumcision alone cannot bring the HIV/AIDS
epidemic in Africa under control. Even circumcised
men can become infected, though their risk of doing
so is much lower," the journal cautioned in a commentary.
