Shame on You, LA Times!

Over the years, I've learned to take a close look at the results of studies done in Africa. I've also learned to take a close look at studies done on circumcision. So you can imagine the extent to which my eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw a recent LA Times article saying that a new study from Africa has shown that the rate of HIV infection for circumcised males was lower than for those who were allowed to keep what Mother Nature and the Good Lord saw fit to equip them with at birth.

The first thing that the LA Times article forgot to mention was that the "study" they quoted had so many serious flaws that the highly respected British medical journal Lancet refused to publish it. Ooops!

The study claims to be a random controlled trial, but it wasn't. It was also stopped early. Some reviewers of it feel that if it had been completed, it might have shown no difference in infection rates between men who are circumcised and those who aren't. Worse yet, it forgot to mention things like which of the men in the study used condoms, and it didn't control for the number of men who had visited medical clinics, which in Africa are so challenged when it comes to disinfection technique that many of these clinics cause more infections than they cure.

There was also a little ethical problem with the African study, given how the researchers supposedly sat by and watched quietly while some of the men got HIV infections without being informed that condoms could help. This places the African study right up there with America's Tuskegee syphilis studies, where penicillin was intentionally withheld from men who had syphilis.

Okay, black men in Tuskegee, black men in Africa--I'm hoping the fellow who wrote the article for the LA Times wasn't black, and I'm willing to bet he doesn't have a foreskin! I'm also amazed at how a study with so much sloppy, incompetent science ever made the light of day.

For those of you who genuinely care about your infant son's health, why not consider a danger that is a wee bit more immediate than HIV in Africa? It is called Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). This infection has at times reached near epidemic levels in the United States, and it can be a serious problem in newborn nurseries. Its most frequent infant victims are circumcised boys, although more research on this is needed. The infection gets into the body through the circumcision wound, and it can cause impetigo, staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome, bacteremia, cellulitis, pneumonia, arthritis, osteomyelitis, pustolosis, pyoderma, empyema, and sometimes death.

As for the recent African study, it's one of only a couple of studies that I've ever seen that claims circumcision is for the greater good--and these have suffered from methodological errors that you could drive a truck through. For instance, in one study, researchers instructed the parents of uncircumcised babies to pull back the foreskins of their infant sons during each bath in order to clean around the head of the penis. Yet nature glues the foreskin to the head of the newborn's penis, and it isn't until much later that it gradually comes unglued. (Only 42% of boys between 8 and 10 years of age are able to fully retract their foreskins.) Retracting the foreskin of a newborn is almost guaranteed to create medical problems, but this study is still quoted as a justification for circumcision. Lord only knows how long we'll be hearing about the sloppy African study as a reason to circumcise baby boys.

Until the past few years, the vast majority of males in America have been circumcised, and America still has one of the highest HIV rates of any country on the planet--higher than a number of European countries where few of the men are circumcised. They stopped circumcising males in New Zealand thirty years ago, and the rate of HIV is lower there than here.

Perhaps this is why you'll be hard-pressed to find any medical organizations anywhere in the world that recommend routine circumcision for baby boys. And I suspect that each and every medical organization will tell you that you are seriously deluding yourself if you think that the presence or absence of a foreskin, rather than a condom, will help prevent the spread of disease.

As for myself, I wouldn't go betting my son's foreskin on shady science and a reporter who didn't bother to do his homework. Shame on the LA Times for writing such a misleading and ill-researched article. It should have been retracted faster than a foreskin on a honeymoon in Hawaii.