Open up. It’s the Penis Police

Via Neels Blom's Blog
From Rome comes the news that adult male circumcision reduces the chances of HIV transmission from women sex partners to men by up to 60 percent. “Is that all?” thought the member (of the Upper Jukskei Fly-fishing Collective). “Just 60 percent?” He would have thought that for a sacrifice of, say, as much as 10 percent, the return on investment would have been far greater.




Still, we should count ourselves lucky. If Caesar’s demand had come from a medical conference in Venice, it would have been for a pound of flesh, and who can say what percentage that would amount to. Imagine the feeble protests from the waiting rooms in the health department’s thousands of newly constructed block houses dotted across the country. “You want 10 percent of what? How do you want it? Tumescent or flaccid?”

And let there be no doubt that the news from Rome is in fact an instruction from our Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi, who voluntarily subjected himself to just such a penis reduction exercise in the course of a three-year campaign in the Orange Farm Township south of Joburg. The order may not yet be enforceable by our courts, but the state’s influence and manipulative powers make it no less compelling an instruction to naive boys and men than if Josef Mengele backed up by a squad of jackboots banged on the door of your shack: “Open up. It is the Penis Police.”

Rome issued its instruction ostensibly based on a study, the Bophelo Pele Male Circumcision project, conducted by the US’s research and development NGO Progresses and South Africa’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases. It was funded by the French National Agency for Research on AIDS and Viral Hepatitis. Business Day’s Tamar Kahn reports that the researchers offered free circumcision to boys and men over the age of 15. More than 20 000 of them complied.
The experiment showed that the rate of HIV infection was 76% lower among circumcised boys and men than among those who retained their natural sexual tissue and that the prevalence of HIV was 55% lower among those who had been under the knife than those had not.
The member is almost certain that the ethical requirements of clinical trial have been fulfilled to the letter, that the data collection for the research report has been done in the utmost integrity and that the researchers who formulated the hypotheses have been in no way influenced by popular misandry and the perception of men as testosterone-poisoned sexually promiscuous deviants for whom a cure has to be found, surgically if necessary.

What the report does not provide is a falsifiability protocol to test the methodology of the experiment. That, as Karl Popper, reminds us, would cast doubt on the validity of the experiment. Dr Dirk Taljaard of Progresses does note, however, that the study has not found any evidence that circumcised boys and men are adopting more risky sexual behavior.
But nothing is said about less risky sexual behavior. Specifically, the study does not account for any other behavioral changes at Orange Farm, such as the possibility of a response to an acutely raised awareness of HIV risks associated with sex following the circumcision project and other HIV campaigns over the three-year study period. As far as the member has been able to determine, Bophelo Pele data do not exist for abstention in their sample, an increase (or otherwise) in the use of condoms, or for the attrition of test subjects due to hospitalization, death or migration.
The member would have expected that, at the very least, the report would have included some references for comparison with HIV incidence and prevalence in societies where male circumcision is the cultural norm, even if the comparisons would be skewed by socio-economic conditions.
The researchers say in their report (http://www.malecircumcision.org/publications) that their next steps will be to create an example of what could be done to “roll out” male circumcision in southern Africa and to determine the feasibility of neonatal male circumcision. What the country needs, says Nathan Geffen, who is a member of the study’s scientific committee, is to make male circumcision a priority intervention in combating the spread of HIV/Aids. Business Day quotes him as saying that over the next two or three years, “we need to provide several million circumcisions.”

If you wake up from the imperial dream and know some physiology one would see it is all a satanic misconception that circumcision prevents HIV. The tissue on the intact Glans, and around the foreskin's inside layer are exactly the same as one would find for instance in your mouth or under the eyelid. This moist fluid like environment called mucosa membrane is filled with cells that defend the body from pathogens (bacteria viruses and fungi). Lysosomes are produced by these cells that protect and self-clean the penis here. It is a powerful cleaner/disinfectant that kills viruses (and HIV a very weak virus) as it breaks down old used dead cells and bacteria on a sub cellular level, using the world’s most powerful cleaning ingredients, enzymes. There is really no use for soap below your foreskin and washing your glans with soap will dry it out and harden the glans, so a good rinse with Luke warm water is enough cleaning required. The worst hardened dried out glans’s are those of circumcised men. Fact is More vigorous and prolonged thrusting required (as there are a huge loss of nerve endings) to achieve orgasm with a circumcised penis will cause "breaks, tears, micro fissures, abrasions, and lacerations through which HIV in semen can enter the receiving partner's bloodstream.

That is a frightening prospect. It means the state is willing and keen to cut off a lot of sexual tissue from every penis in the land based on an incomplete sociological-medical trial. Even in a banana republic such as ours, the ethical rules for medical trials are onerous and exacting. Ask any drug company hoping to introduce to South Africa new life-saving medicines clinically proven elsewhere in the world.
That leads the member to speculate about what possibly motivates our health authorities’ desperate grasping. Might it be the costs and capacity difficulties the state is experiencing with dispensing anti-retroviral drugs? The member’s (admittedly anecdotal) evidence of the state’s HIV project in rural areas is that the demand for ARVs is far greater than what the state could hope to supply. A doctor who practices exclusively among the poor in the Free State says that, based on the number of HIV-positive patients he sees every day, the projected the costs to the state each year in providing ARVs to everyone who qualified would be greater than the entire annual national budget.
On the weight of the evidence, the member has decided to build and patent a titanium chastity belt adapted for men. Let’s see the misanthropist nanny state get its scalpel past that lot.