Circumcision Prevents Deaths

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. 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.

“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.

Excerpt from Reuters article: Circumcision may stop millions of HIV deaths
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

Full article: Circumcision may stop millions of HIV deaths: study – Yahoo! News