TEL AVIV (JTA)—In a clinic in the hills of Swaziland's capital, Israeli doctors have been training their counterparts in male circumcision, hoping expertise in the ancient technique will help in the battle against the modern scourge of AIDS.
The United Nations announced last year that the procedure could reduce the rate of HIV transmission by up to 60 percent. It was in Israel, with its experience performing adult male circumcision on a wide scale, that the international medical community found an unlikely partner in the global fight against AIDS.
"Israeli medicine and public health are positioned as a real asset in African countries," said Dr. Inon Schenker, a director of Operation Abraham, the consortium that sent the doctors to Swaziland and plans to send more training teams to Africa. "They recognize the expertise and experience gained in Israel over the past decade, where close to 100,000 male circumcisions have been conducted."
Israel's accidental expertise in conducting large-scale numbers of male circumcisions came with the mass wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union, which brought with it a dramatic rise in men requesting the procedure.
To meet the demand, Israeli hospitals set up special circumcision clinics in five hospitals throughout the country. In turn, Israeli doctors gained unique experience in performing a high number of procedures efficiently.
It's a model organizations such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations would like to see replicated in Africa as a tool for combating the spread of HIV.
2 comments:
Somebody tell the Israeli doctors that condoms are 95 times as cost effective at preventing AIDS, even if the hype from the 3 large Africa "controlled" trials is plausible (which it isn't).
Most of the half-million US men who have died of AIDS were circumcised at birth. Circumcision does not prevent AIDS.
tlc,
Damn good point. Circumcision may help statistically but it doesn't stop transmission.
james
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