Circumcision reduces HIV risk

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.