Ethics against AIDS, not statistics - Sigismond
From Peaceful Beginnings
(sexist, racist and biased enquiries upon black human guinea-pigs)
Introduction
The one who gives up an essential liberty for a fleeting and uncertain security does not deserve either security or liberty. Benjamin Franklin
Ethics and deontology forbidding amputation for prophylactic purposes, even 100% protection through circumcision does not warrant a mutilating “vaccine”.
In order to fight AIDS, the safe and sound methods are personal pleasure (autosexuality), the detection of the virus through previous to non protected intercourse testing, fidelity (monogamy is recommended) and condoms. Talbott demonstrated (1) that in Africa, the most struck continent, the great carrier of the epidemic is not the foreskin but prostitution. Indeed, African prostitutes are four times more numerous and four times more contaminated than those of the rest of the world. However, “dry sex”, sodomy, multi-partnership, adultery, polygamy and homophilia when it is not zoosexual touring with endemic carriers-of-the-virus monkeys (very probably at the source of the epidemic; indeed, one zoophile homophile was enough to contaminate humanity), must also be rejected steadfastly. Let us insist upon the fact that the use of drugs and the provoked euphoria dangerously favour risk taking. Violence calls for violence and one does not fight debauchery by the violence of sexual mutilation. At the contrary, for all those who have not yet found a stable relationship with a healthy person, autosexuality is the surest resort. This implies not to have been deprived from its specific natural organs: the clitoris (its ablation can be compared to the castration of the penis) or the foreskin (circumcision is a threat of castration that traumatizes even little girls). In a continent where women are now the first affected by an epidemic initially spread by men, they are the first interested in adopting the ethic of fidelity. And this all the more that it is also an ethic of equality in which the loss of diversity is rewarded by gain in affective security, and deeper relationship.
Despite that, three important enquiries (2, 3, 4) on the efficiency of circumcision in order to protect men from the HIV have been led in Sub-Saharan Africa. They succeeded a whole series since twenty years, with similar aim and result, but the press touted again the same disputable conclusion that eventually determined the WHO to recommend mass circumcision in Africa.
Sexism and racism in the assumption of contamination
and in the lack of a vital information
In no developed country (except may be the USA) would the enquirers have thought of proposing a circumcision-condom alternative that assumes that the partner is contaminated. Elementary deontology forbids contemplating the possibility of that choice before having performed the test.
Moreover, in the first study, the test was practised for the needs of the enquiry, without disclosing the results to the subjects. Indeed, it occurred, at the beginning, that 146 (72 + 74) of the subjects had contracted the virus (5). These persons were not warned of it (6)! From the victims’ point of view, the matter is racism; such a decision would be unthinkable in a developed country. It is inadmissible that physicians would have attempted on the right to dignity of human persons by depriving them from a diagnosis of lethal contagion. Even the journalist who denounced this racism against the contaminated did not think of denouncing it towards the non-contaminated who had the right and duty to know. This lack of medical care may account for the further lack of precautions of some of them. This study was refused for publication in Europe, by The Lancet (7), but it was published in the United States still practising circumcision by a majority. Such a use of the public funds granted by the French government to the INSERM or the Agence nationale de recherche sur le SIDA is appalling.
The use of human guinea-pigs
The approach of these studies makes one’s hair stand on end. In Orange Farm, a poor borough of Johannesburg, 3 128 men were recruited (2). Circumcised right away were 1 546 human guinea-pigs. The others underwent the mutilation 14 months later. For, according to the hasty and naive promoters, the venture was so successful that they stopped it to circumcise the rest of the sample.
The authors of the enquiry eased their conscience by providing their victims with condoms and advice. But there was a time when experiments upon humans were sheltered behind the barbed wire of extermination camps. Today they are done in the open; in order to proclaim the so-called positive results of crimes realized with the collaboration of victims fascinated by the title of physician, a few scientists obtain media coverage in the congresses of the International AIDS Society. Science, how many crimes are committed in your name!
The limitation of the enquiries to men and blacks only
The enquiry in Orange Farm asserts being randomized (statistically representative of the population through drawing lots) but women were excluded from it. But since when is a population composed of one sex only?! Moreover, how could a small town of black people validly represent South-African population that includes 11% of whites?! Deliberately androcentered and ethnocentered, the three enquiries are all the more statistically biased that they study the risk of transmission of women to men without having registered the HIV status of women in contact with the subjects of each sample. They do not either take into account age, marital status and religion, so important in matter of sexual behaviour.
A fascinating short term outcome
The Orange Farm enquiry confirmed that over a period of 14 months, circumcision considerably lessens the number of masculine contaminations, 60% lower with the maimed. The two further enquiries, led in Kenya and Uganda, over a little longer period (15 months), showed a lessening of the “protection” that passes from 60% to 53 and 48% (3, 4). This fast lessening of protection, within one month, shows that circumcision only slows down the entry of the VIH. However, there are good reasons to think that, in the long run, the cure will be worse than the harm.
The contradictory studies
First, the French Conseil national of AIDS remarked that in half-circumcised Lesotho, AIDS hits the mutilated by 22.8% against 15.2% for intacts. Second, Garenne's (8) long term study over 13 African countries shows no difference between mutilated and intact.
Two predisposing biological factors
A genetic mutation hitting the Africans would also explain their great vulnerability to the epidemic (9). Then, Chenine & al. (10) showed that a water worm that contaminates particularly the South-African population, affecting 50% of women, also enhances this vulnerability.
The long-term consequences
With the victims who will endure the life-long consequence of the operation, its implementation will end in inverse effect: spreading the epidemic through reluctance in the use of condoms, for two reasons. On the one hand, the mutilated – particularly young subjects – will think themselves sufficiently protected. The rumour is already spreading into Africa: “Circumcision is the best condom, the best vaccine!” On the other hand and foremost, by striking a blow at the sensitivity of the glans (11), circumcision makes condom use, already little pleasant to normal men, frankly daunting. The extent of the epidemic in Africa and the USA – where the majority of the male population is circumcised – strongly suggests that, in the long term, circumcision has the inverse effect to the looked for aim. Indeed, the USA is the developed country where the epidemic spread the most.
The second consequence will be a worsening of the transmissibility of the virus to women – and children of pregnant women – due to abrasion of the vagina provoked by the absence of the foreskin. Two enquiries (12, 13) disclosed that the foreskin limits irritating friction against the vagina, for three reasons. First of all, normal men look for the fine sensations provided by the exquisite erogenous and tactile sensitivity of the foreskin (that of the glans is merely erogenous), through movements of moderate amplitude, in a less gymnastic, slower, gentler and more tender act. Then, the foreskin glides on the shaft so that friction against the vagina is reduced. At last, through its mobility and folds, it plays a part similar to that of the rings of a piston and inhibits the draining out of vaginal secretions by the rim of the glans. Conversely, in order to compensate for their loss of sensitivity, the sexually mutilated require movements on a greater scale inducing, indeed, deep massage of the glans but also intense rubbing. Moreover, the mushroom of the corona of their glans voids the secretions little by little and the vagina gets irritated. We already know that women are twice more likely to be contaminated that men. Circumcision can only worsen this figure. The AIDSUNO 2004 and 2006 (14) reports revealed that in Sub-Saharan Africa, where circumcision concerns less than 20% of men, women represent 59% of contaminated persons. But South Africa is the land of “dry sex”, which excludes preservative and irritates at a maximum level. A recent enquiry (15) disclosed that women of mutilated men are more prone to contracting HIV.
Conclusion
The great statistical sophistication of these enquiries has hidden the treacherous, short-term effectiveness of the solution they advocate. Moreover, for lack of integrating ethical and behavioural variables, statistic enquiries, however fascinating their conclusions may be, are likely to be gravely misleading. The appalling extent of the pandemic of AIDS in Africa favoured the making guilty of a foreskin decidedly a scapegoat for epidemics of puritan phobia. All the more if they are sexist, since circumcision slows the pandemic down with men but accelerates it for women. If one adds up the genetic vulnerability and that provoked by the schistosoma mansoni, one is forced to relativize the part of the foreskin.
There still are in Africa many peoples who resisted the epidemic of circumcision. The probability is now high that they would abandon their antique wisdom in front of the pseudo-scientific, neo-colonizing invasion that recommends circumcision against AIDS in Pretoria but not in Paris. Whereas, at request of the prosecution, a Finish court acknowledged that circumcision is a penal assault, whereas South-Africa was the first country in the world to prohibit circumcision of children under 16 without their consent, a few physicians use the AIDS epidemic as an excuse to bring barbarity in general use and mutilate the last black upholders of an ethic which respects the child and refuses the quasi-racist distinction that pretends founding collective identities upon a destruction of that of the species.
World circumcision – and soon genetic manipulation in a “brave new world” – rather than fighting the real sources of the epidemic is the long-term solution suggested by sorcerer’s apprentices who benefit from the gullibility, conformism and antique hygienist superstition that favour paedo-sexual criminality. Psychoanalysis will see there an avatar of the sadistic, obsessive, parental and societal compulsion to threaten sons and daughters with castration, and even to castrate the latter from their erectile organ, in order to submit both of them better. As this threat is not verbalized, it remains unconscious and its consequences can be disastrous.
At all events, even if circumcision has a strong incidence upon the transmissibility of AIDS, a medicine that is only 60% and short-term safe must be ruled out if it can have the effect of dissuading the use of a 99% safe one. As the president of Uganda stated, one has no right to neglect a 40% risk. Second and foremost, we saw that the protective effect quickly lessens within time.
Not only do elementary ethics forbid mutilating the human body as a preventive measure but also puritan mutilation and benign neglect towards debauchery cannot save humanity from AIDS (8, 16, 17). African voices already raised (18) to denounce the now well-known behaviours responsible for its development. Instead of opposing them, circumcision is going to favour them. This solution is thus still more aberrant than the ablation of breasts for the prevention of cancer. The AIDS epidemic, much more than other STDs, reminds a world lead astray by the reign of pornography of the elementary rules of love ethic: “One must not make love without true love and true love (respect, tenderness, fidelity) does not exist without true knowledge.” Their implementation cannot be done without the abandonment of the taboo of autosexuality. According to Marilyn Milos’s motto (18), AIDS must be fought through education, not amputation. Ethics and education enable really fighting AIDS, the circumciser moral order cannot. This is why circumcision for statistical motive, recently declared by OMS officials, is an ethical derangement. Already two medical societies: the Australian Federation of AIDS Organizations (AFAO) (20) and the French Conseil national du SIDA (21), reacted against the recommendation of the WHO.
Between worsening of transmissibility to women, loss of motivation for the use of condoms and crumbling of protection within time, not only will the remedy be worse than the evil but also will it divert large amounts of money from the only efficient protection and from research. The urologic jet society offers itself in Africa, at the expense of the taxpayers, costly for the ecosphere stays. It tries to get Schweitzer prizes saving the settlement in Lambaréné. The three AIDS trials led in sub-Saharan Africa were an alarm screaming to the universe that the safety of condoms is made for rich whites whereas circumcision is a fallacious and short-term stopgap for poor blacks. However, the latter had rather offer themselves condoms than the prostitutes through which they contaminate their wives back home. At all events, the younger must not suffer from an epidemic resulting from their elders’ misconduct nor the whole masculine population from that of a few ones.
As noticed by Marilyn Milos 6th September 2008, during the conclusion of the 10th symposium of NOCIRC in the School of law of the University of Keele, when white men come into Africa to mutilate back men's penises, "This is racism!". When white men recommend circumcision against AIDS without doing the same for the remaining of the world, it is also racism.
Sigismond – (Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux), HEC, Lic. Sc. Éco.
oldsigismund@hotmail.com
Psychoanalysis researcher, specialist of infantile sexual mutilation (ISM), author of “Sexual mutilation, the child’s point of view”, for free at http://groups.msn.com/circabolition or intactwiki.org
(1) Talbott J. “Size matters: the number of prostitutes and the global HIV/AIDS pandemic”. PLoS ONE 2007, 2(6). http://plosone.org/doi/pone.0000543
(2) Auvert B, Taljaard D, Lagarde E, Songnim-Tambekou J, Sitta R, et al. (2005) Randomized, Controlled Intervention Trial of Male Circumcision for Reduction of HIV Infection Risk: The ANRS 1265 Trial. PLoS Med 2(11): e298. http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020298
(3) Bailey C, Moses S, Parker CB, et al. Male circumcision for HIV prevention in young men in Kisumu, Kenya: a randomized controlled trial. Lancet 2007; 369: 643–56. http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/news/newsreleases/2006/AMC12_06.htm http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/news/QA/AMC12_QA.htm
(4) Gray H., Kigozy G., Serwadda D. et al. Male circumcision for HIV prevention in young men in Rakai, Uganda: a randomized trial. Lancet 2007; 369: 657-66.
(6) Schoofs M, Lueck S, Phillips MM. Study says circumcision reduces AIDS risk by 70%. Findings from South Africa may offer powerful way to cut HIV transmission. Wall Street Journal 2005 July 5: A1.
(7) Cohen J. AIDS research. Male circumcision thwarts HIV infection. Science 2005 Aug 5; 309 (5736): 860.
(8) Garenne M. Long term population effect of male circumcision in generalized HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. African Journal of AIDS Research 2008, 7 (1): 1–8.
(9) He W. et al. Duffy antigens receptors for chemokines mediates trans-infection of HIV-1 from red blood cells to target cells and affects HIV-AIDS susceptibility. Cell Host and Microbe 2008; 4: 52-62.
(10) Chenine A.-L., Shai-Kobiler E., Steele L., Ong H., Augostini P., Song R., Lee S., Autissier P., Ruprecht R., Secor W. Acute schistosoma mansoni infection increases susceptibility to systemic SHIV clade c infection in rhesus macaques after mucosal virus exposure. PLOS neglected tropical diseases, July 2008. http://www.plosntds.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pntd.0000265#aff3
(11) Sorrells M., Snyder J., Reiss M., Eden C., Milos M., Wilcox N., Van Howe R. Fine-touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis. BJU International 99 (4), 864-869. http://www.icgi.org/touch-test/touch-test-article.pdf
(12) O’Hara J., O’Hara K. The effect of male circumcision on the sexual enjoyment of the female partner. BJU International 1999; 83 (suppl. 1): 79-84. http://cirp.org/library/anatomy/ohara
(13) Boyle G. Bensley G., Effects of male circumcision on female arousal and orgasm. N Z Med J 2003; 116 (1181): 595-6. http://cirp.org/library/sex_function/bensley1
(14) http://data.unaids.org/pub/EpiReport/2006/2006_EpiUpdate_Fr.pdf
(15) http://www.icgi.org/2008/02/wives-more-likely-to-contract-hiv-from-circumcised-husbands/
(16) Green G. McAllister R., Peterson K., Travis J. Male circumcision is not the HIV ‘vaccine’ we have been waiting for! Future HIV Therapy, May 2008, Vol. 2, n° 3, 193-199.
(17) T. Dinh. Genital warts among 18- to 59-year-olds in the United States, National health and nutrition examination survey, 1999-2004. Sexually Transmitted Diseases 35 (4): 357-360, April 2008.
(18) http://geocities.com/RainForest/3719/circoncision.html
(19) NOCIRC 2006 newsletter. http://www.nocirc.org (NOCIRC publications)
(20) http://www.afao.org.au/view_articles.asp?pxa=ve&pxs=169&pxsc=&pxsgc=&id=633
(21) http://www.sida-info-service.org/direct/news.php4?id=384 info-service.org/direct/news.php4?id=384
