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January 14, 2007

The Mainstream media discovers circumcision does something about AIDS

We spoke about how circumcision decreases AIDS transmission rates a month ago and again six months ago.

The NY Times magazine claims that it might be effective enough to for us to consider it our vaccine. The recommend widespread free circumcisions as an aids control technique.

For years, AIDS researchers have observed that many African tribes that circumcise boys or young men had lower AIDS rates than those that don’t, and that Africa’s Muslim nations, where circumcision is near universal, had far fewer AIDS cases than predominantly Christian ones. The first research proof came in 2005, when a study in South Africa was stopped early in the face of evidence that the men who had been randomly assigned to be circumcised were getting 60 percent fewer H.I.V. infections than the men assigned to the control group. Last month, ethics boards halted two similar studies, in Uganda and Kenya, when they found similar results. In both, the circumcised men caught the AIDS virus half as often as the uncircumcised control group.

Circumcision would be given more weight if the world recognized that it is, in fact, the real-world equivalent of an AIDS vaccine....

Many vaccines provide nearly 100 percent protection — after my daughters finish their two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, for example, they won’t have to think about those diseases again. But that’s not on the horizon for AIDS. “Fifty to 60 percent efficacy is what people would feel really good about,” says Frances Priddy, the director of efficacy trials with the AIDS vaccine initiative. The best candidates in the vaccine pipeline right now — which won’t be ready until 2013 at the earliest — wouldn’t keep you from getting H.I.V. They instead would seek to change your body’s response to the virus so that if you did get infected, the disease would progress more slowly — or not at all — and you would be less infectious to others.

An efficacy rate of 50 to 60 percent is actually a lot better than it sounds, because of herd immunity. We get AIDS from one another. Every time a person is rendered less infectious, the chance of an uninfected person catching H.I.V. from each sexual contact drops, and in a virtuous circle, the whole community becomes progressively safer. A vaccine of 50 to 60 percent efficacy might come close to wiping out the epidemic in places with low AIDS rates. In high-prevalence areas, it could reduce the epidemic and save millions of lives.

Posted by OneEyedMan at January 14, 2007 1:15 PM

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Posted by: johnnyooooo at January 15, 2007 9:04 AM

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