By Rachel Stockton

In two different reports published by the New England Journal of Medicine, one in December of 2002 and the other in March of this year, it was announced that circumcised men are less likely to spread HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer in women, and the herpes simplex virus.

Then in 2006, the National Institutes of Health announced that circumcision reduces a man’s risk of contracting HIV from a female by one-half. The foreskin of the penis, which is removed during circumcision, has an abundance of the sentinel cells of the immune system. These types of cells attach easily to HIV via small tears that occur in the foreskin during intercourse.

These observations led some medical researchers to believe that male circumcision would reduce a female partner’s risk of contracting the disease from her male partner. Johns Hopkins researchers, under the leadership of Dr. Maria Wawer, set about to establish clinical trials to prove this hypothesis in Kenya and Uganda. However, the team quickly ascertained that circumcision played no role in alleviating the risk to female partners.

922 uncircumcised, HIV infected men ages 15-19 years were brought in for the study. Half of them were immediately circumcised, the other half waited two years before having the procedure. Over 24 months, they also tracked 163 female partners of the men in the study. Their conclusions: condom use is essential,regardless of whether a male partner is circumcised or not.

However, when one takes a look at the broader perspective, it can easily be said that circumcision reduces the risk of AIDS among females in general, because it reduces the number of males transmitting the disease by half.