Press releases that make you go "You son of a bitch."

[electricland]

From PLoS ONE [to clarify, an editor has pointed out that the press release was written by the author of the paper] comes this charmer:

Male
circumcision overstated as prevention tool against AIDS

Some choice excerpts (coherent commentary will have to wait until I
stop fuming):

In new academic research published today in the online,
open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal PLoS ONE, male
circumcision is found to be much less important as a deterrent to the
global AIDS pandemic than previously thought. The author, John R.
Talbott, has conducted statistical empirical research across 77
countries of the world and has uncovered some surprising results.

The new study finds that the number of infected prostitutes in a
country is the key to explaining the degree to which AIDS has infected
the general population. Prostitute communities are typically very
highly infected with the virus themselves, and because of the large
number of sex partners they have each year, can act as an engine
driving infection rates to unusually high levels in the general
population. The new study is entitled "Size Matters: The Number of
Prostitutes and the Global HIV/AIDS Pandemic" and is freely available
online at the PLoS ONE publication website at
http://plosone.org/doi/pone.0000543.

So far, so good. I've
been suspicious of the whole circumcision thing, and this makes sense.
But then it goes on...

The study has a number of important findings that should
impact policy decisions in the future. First, male circumcision, which
in previous studies had been found to be important in controlling
AIDS, becomes statistically irrelevant once the study controls for the
number of prostitutes in a country. The study finds that the more
Muslim countries of North Africa do indeed suffer much less AIDS than
southern and western Africa, but this lower prevalence is not due to
higher numbers of circumscribed males in these Muslim communities, but
rather results from the fact that there are significantly fewer
prostitutes in northern Africa on a per capita basis. It appears
that religious families in the north, specifically concerned fathers
and brothers, do a much better job protecting their daughters from
predatory males than do those in the south. [Emphasis
mine.]

Let's hear it for those fathers and brothers!
Because women have no agency of their own.

Moving on:

Talbott's new study suggests that the reason is that
Africa as a whole has four times as many prostitutes as the rest of
the word and they are more than four times as infected. Some southern
Africa countries have as many as 7% of their adult females infected
and working as prostitutes while in the developed world typically this
percentage of infected prostitutes is less than .1%. If these 7% of
infected prostitutes in Africa sleep with five men in a week that
means they are subjecting 35% of the country's male population to the
virus weekly. The virus is not easy to transmit heterosexually, b
ut over time with multiple exposures, infection is inevitable. These
men then act as a conduit to bring the virus home to their villages,
their other casual sex partners and to their wives.

(1)
Assuming that each of those encounters is unique. (2) The nerve of
those prostitutes, subjecting all those poor helpless men to the
virus!

The study has important policy implications. Several
international AIDS organizations have begun to provide funding for
male circumcisions as a deterrent to AIDS. While male circumcision may
indeed reduce the risk of transmission by some 50% to 60% in each
sexual encounter, reducing single encounter transmission rates alone
cannot control the epidemic. The reason is that individuals in highly
infected countries have multiple contacts with the infected so
reducing transmission rates only defers the inevitable.

The real question is what can be done with the prostitute community.
Outlawing the world's oldest profession would most likely prove to be
ineffective. If the profession can be legalized and treatment and care
provided to the practitioners, there would be much more reason to be
hopeful. But, and this is the key, programs of action can not just be
voluntary. Too many innocent people are dying and there is too much
disregard for human life among infected prostitutes to leave treatment
decisions solely up to them. A program of testing and treatment for
prostitutes must be mandatory and those that refuse treatment must be
held liable.

*sputters*

Many international aid organizations are against such
mandatory treatment programs for prostitutes as they find them to be
discriminatory, violate the individual's human rights and are
perceived as an attack on female prostitutes who are viewed as victims
of gender and income inequality. Such organizations do not properly
weigh the loss of human rights and life itself that this virus,
unleashed on a community, is causing. This virus, itself, is a
violation of human rights and we must do everything in our power to
stop it. To argue we should do nothing about infected prostitutes
during an AIDS epidemic because of a fear of creating a stigma against
the infected would be like an animal rights activist claiming that a
rabid dog must be allowed to run free in a neighborhood regardless of
how many men women and children he infected and
killed.

Got that? Infected prostitutes=rabid
dogs.

Like I say, too angry for coherence right now.

Comments

Point of Clarification

[(Anonymous)]

Just a very quick clarification needed here in that this study wasn't published in PLoS Medicine but in PLoS ONE. PLoS Medicine is a different journal with different editorial criteria. Also it is worth mentioning that the press release was written by the author of the study and does not necessarily reflect the views of PLoS as an organisation.

Chris Surridge,
Managing Editor, PLoS ONE

Re: Point of Clarification

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I've updated the post.

[lietya.livejournal.com]

Wow. Just... wow.

Once again, I notice, prostitutes are forcibly having sex with unwilling men (and then taking their money!), as so often happens; after all, if women didn't choose prostitution as an exciting and fulfilling career from among the millions of options available to females in highly sexist, impoverished countries, there would be no hapless men being victimized. Nope.

[ozreison.livejournal.com]

Because women are evil and have so many rights and privileges in so many countries. *eyeroll*

[monkeycommando.livejournal.com]

Um, from you're first bolded quote, apart from denying the possibility of female agency, it seems like he's confusing supply and demand.

I'm open to the possibility that the circumcision corelation is actually more a corelation to Islamic culture, and I'm also open to the possibility that the corelation also relates to the number of prostitutes in an area.

But the first unwarranted conclusion I'd leap to is that in more Islamic areas, there is a lower overall demand for prostitutes from the men (plus, I'd bet those who do want to hire a prostitute go out of their communities to do so) therefore there are fewer prostitutes working in those areas--and you know, the risk of getting sentenced to a stoning might discourage some women from setting up shop. Those mechanisms would be true regardless of the level and type of coercion applied to a given woman to become a prostitute.

Plus, I infer from this summary that individual HIV virus units are spawned in the blood of prostitutes, like so many midichlorians, rather than being spread to prostitutes from infected clients.

(He has a point about legalization and treatment not being a sufficient harm reduction approach, but that's because without educating the clients, there will likely still be a demand for high-risk acts from the prostitutes).

Oh, and he has no idea what the concept of "human rights" means. And also doesn't understand that the reason you want to reduce the stigma is so that infected people find out they're infected as early as possible so they can be treated early, and are less likely to infect others.

And also: "Size Matters"? As the title of an article looking at circumcision? Or is it that only the tall prostitutes are causing the problem? Or is what you really mean in not "size" but "prevalence/percentage/ratio"?

[elissa-carey.livejournal.com]

Oh boy. The author also totally overlooks such things as the prevalence of rape in some countries, where the belief is that if you sleep with a virgin you'll be "cured" -- whether the virgin wants to sleep with you or not.

Yeah, that's some thorough study, alright. Was the article supposed to be about male circumcision reducing the prevalence of HIV/AIDS, or about finding other ways to reduce said prevalence? Because it seems he went totally off the track on a Twinkie defense.

[lietya.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the absolutely sickening practice of believing that if you rape a baby or toddler, you'll be cured (because how else to guarantee she's a virgin than to pick someone so young she'd be obviously damaged if another man had had a turn *spit*). Then when the rape victims are stigmatized and shunned from society, after being infected with AIDS, guess what profession is likely to keep them from starving?

I bet it must be just a great feeling to go through that and then end up with some sanctimonious prick (word chosen advisedly) calling you a "rabid dog" who should be put down for society's own good.

male circumcision

[(Anonymous)]

Also, the "study" claims to refute the data (dozens of rigorous studies, etc.) on the effect of male circumcision in reducing HIV risk for heterosexual transmission, yet the "study" does not even inlude a shred of DATA about male circumcision and HIV! Amazing...