South Africa to launch massive HIV/AIDS campaign

By IANS
Tuesday, March 30, 2010

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa, which has over five million people with HIV/AIDS, will launch a large nationwide campaign against the disease in April.

With a target of reaching 15 million people by 2011, the HIV Counselling and Testing (HCT) campaign will be launched April 15 when tests for rape victims, male circumcision and distribution of condoms will be done on a massive scale, the country’s health minister Aaron Motsoaledi told BuaNews, the state-owned news agency.

Male circumcision and distribution of condoms has been accorded top priority by the ministry. South Africa needs 2.5 billion male condoms each year and 177 million have been purchased for the initial phase of the campaign.

Ninety-one million condoms were distributed last week, the minister was quoted as saying by BuaNews.

Motsoaledi said during the campaign, the department will introduce medical male circumcision on a large scale.

By 2015, around 2.5 million male circumcisions will be conducted and the minister himself pledged to perform 1,000 of them.

The minister assured rape victims that they will no longer need a case number before getting treatment at health institutions.

When a victim arrives at a health institution, they won’t be asked to produce a case number before being treated, he said.

“We can no longer allow hospital CEOs to send back rape survivors to the police station to get case numbers first before getting treatment,” he said.

More than 4,300 health facilities will cater to the people during the mission, out of which 490 have already started.
Filed under: HIV, Medicine, World

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Mark Lyndon
March 31, 2010: 6:46 am

Circumcision is a dangerous distraction in the fight against AIDS. There are six African countries where men are *more* likely to be HIV+ if they’ve been circumcised: Cameroon, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, and Swaziland. Eg in Malawi, the HIV rate is 13.2% among circumcised men, but only 9.5% among intact men. In Rwanda, the HIV rate is 3.5% among circumcised men, but only 2.1% among intact men. If circumcision really worked against AIDS, this just wouldn’t happen. We now have people calling circumcision a “vaccine” or “invisible condom”, and viewing circumcision as an alternative to condoms. The South African National Communication Survey on HIV/AIDS, 2009 found that 15% of adults across age groups “believe that circumcised men do not need to use condoms”.

The one randomized controlled trial into male-to-female transmission showed a 54% higher rate in the group where the men had been circumcised btw.

ABC (Abstinence, Being faithful, Condoms) is the way forward. Promoting genital surgery will cost African lives, not save them.

P D Hoath
March 31, 2010: 2:16 am

The Ugandan trials that to circumcision campaign is based on had the following results:
After the trial period the infection rated for circumcised men was 0.85% and the intact group was 2.1 %. for infection transmission from women to men. The 60% reduction sounds big on its own but the reduction is for a route of infection that is hard in the first place. The actual net reduction is only 1.25%.
What is not being advertised is that there was a second set of trials that tested the transmission for HIV infection from men to women (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8154134.stm) which had the following results:
After the trial was halted early the infection rates were: Women infected by their circumcised partners, 18% but women infected by their intact partners was only 12%. Circumcision actually increased the infection rate by 6%.
Given the results of these trials, circumcision, for every infection in stops, will actually cause five more.
This would be bad enough on its own but it gets worse. The trials could not be said to be un-bias as they were conducted by researchers who had been trying to find a disease for circumcision to ‘cure’ for years before the HIV research. The trials were weighted against the uncircumcised men. During the trial period the circumcised men had to abstain from sexual contact for one and a half months while the circumcision healed because, as everybody accepts, having an open wound on the penis massively increases the risk of infection. If they couldn’t abstain for the full 6 weeks the participants had to use a condom, for which all the circumcised men received information on. The uncircumcised men received no such automatic training on this proven method of infection prevention.

Circumcision is just giving men a false sense of security and will lead to more unsafe sexual practices without even being a help in itself. The industrialised nation with the highest HIV infection rate is the industrialised nation with the highest circumcision rate: the USA.
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