Geneva – Heterosexual men should be circumcised because of compelling evidence it reduces their chances of contracting HIV by up to 60 percent, U.N. health agencies said Wednesday.
But men should still use condoms and other protection against the virus, said the World Health Organization and UNAIDS, the U.N. agency that coordinates the global fight against the AIDS virus.
“We must be clear,” said Catherine Hankins of UNAIDS. “Male circumcision does not provide complete protection against HIV.”
Besides condoms, men and women should use protections such as abstinence, delaying the start of sex and reducing the number of sex partners, she said. Otherwise, they could develop a false sense of security and engage in high-risk behavior that could undermine the partial protection provided by male circumcision, the agencies said.
Men also should be warned that they are at a higher risk of being infected with HIV if they resume sex before their circumcision wound has healed, which can take six weeks. Likewise, an HIV-positive man can more easily pass the disease to his partner if the wound has not healed.
More study is needed to determine whether male circumcision will cut the transmission of HIV to women or reduce HIV infection in homosexual intercourse, the statement said.
The recommendations were based on a conference in which experts discussed three trials – in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa – that produced strong evidence of the risk reduction resulting from heterosexual male circumcision.
WHO experts said the trials convinced them after 20 years of observations that circumcision reduces men’s susceptibility to HIV infection partly because the cells in the foreskin of the penis are vulnerable to the virus.
The findings tied in with lower HIV rates in North and West African countries where circumcision has been widely practiced for religious or cultural reasons.
