Problems with circumcision and HIV/AIDS

When I blogged about the German court ruling on circumcision I said that there was evidence that circumcision reduced the risk of HIV/AIDS infection. I may have been a bit premature.

I haven’t read the papers but had my own problem with the idea. If you tell someone it will reduce their risk then they’re more likely to take the risk. After my post I heard from a colleague of mine who has read the paper that at least one of the trials was flawed because those undergoing circumcision where educated on safe sex practices while the others were not. This means they weren’t equal from the start.

Both those issues and more are brought up in this blog post from an Oxford ethicist. In short the studies are described as:

Poorly conducted experiments with dubious results presented in an outrageously misleading fashion.