The medical news media seem to have become especially attached to the idea that male circumcision may provide something new to write about in the, for news media, rather eventless battle against AIDS in Africa. The XIIIth International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa, gained a lot of media attention and here too male circumcision […]

In east and southern Africa, increasing numbers of people are becoming aware of the differenc­es in prevalence of AIDS and STDs between circumcised and uncircumcised men, and they are taking action. Male circumcision is increasingly recommended by traditional healers. Private clinics that specialize in male circumcision, many of which are run by people with minimum […]

The Weiss, Quigley and Hayes (2000) review on male circumcision and HIV prevalence restricts itself to female—male transmission in Sub-Saharan Africa (Weiss et al. 2000), with the explanation that in Sub-Saharan Africa heterosexual transmission is the predominant mode of transmission. They ignore the figures that the primary mode of heterosexual transmission is male to female […]

The most important aspect of the male circumcision debate we wish to highlight is the way in which women are rendered invisible in the entire debate. Not even the opponents of male circumcision raise the issue of women becoming infected too. Instead, women are totally marginalized rendering them to nothing other than sources of infection […]

In all the articles male circumcision is being promoted only to non-Western coun­tries. The first question we need to ask is why male circumcision is researched and promoted as a method to prevent HIV transmission in the South, but not in Eu­rope or the United States? How can medical researchers argue that male circum­cision can […]

What is evident is that the male circumcision research has been conducted on a macro level of large populations of men, often involving whole societies. Differ­ent infection rates in different countries are explained by the rate of male circum­cision in different areas (Halperin and Bailey 1999). In an often cited study by Preventing HIV? Medical […]

that uncircumcised men are at much greater risk of becoming infected with HIV than circumcised men” (2000a:1592). Weiss and colleagues (2000) conducted a “meta-analysis” of previous research on connections between male circumcision and HIV infection rates. This article concludes that “the data from observational studies provide compelling evidence of substantial protective effect of male cir­cumcision […]

Against the background of what Patton calls constructions of ‘African AIDS’ and the knowledge continuously produced among HIV-activists, we want to explore the debate around male circumcision as a means of fighting HIV/AIDS in Africa. The argument in the texts that promote male circumcision is that the removal of the foreskin may reduce a man’s […]

tion. On the basis of statistical information, they assert that despite the problems of reliability of statistics, it seems clear that women, especially young women, are the group that should be given the highest priority in HIV prevention work. Fur­ther, they conclude that this work should focus on political and social issues rath­er than individual […]