ATLANTA, Dec. 19 (UPI) -- Being circumcised significantly reduced the
risk of HIV infection in heterosexual African-American men known to be exposed
to the virus, U.S. researchers say.
Lee Warner and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore studied
the records of more than 26,000 African-American men who had had HIV testing
during visits to two Baltimore sexually transmitted disease clinics from
1993-2000.
The subjects selected for the study said they did not inject drugs and had sex
only with women. Their visits to the clinics were classified as involving known
HIV exposure if there had been a recent notification of such exposure by a sex
partner or by a clinic's disease intervention specialists; clinic visits for
other reasons were classified as involving unknown HIV exposure. By these
criteria, the investigators found 394 visits with known exposure and 40,177
visits with unknown exposure.
In
visits by men with known HIV exposure, being circumcised was associated with a
51 percent reduction in HIV prevalence -- 10.2 percent of circumcised men vs. 22
percent of uncircumcised men. In contrast, HIV prevalence did not significantly
differ in circumcised compared to uncircumcised men with unknown HIV exposure --
2.5 percent versus 3.3 percent.
The findings are published online ahead of print of the Jan. 1 issue of The
Journal of Infectious Diseases.
Source : United Press International
