Old News: Study says circumcision reduces AIDS risk
I'd heard about this link back when I was pregnant with Thing One. It hadn't been studied then, it was more of a thought-experiment. See, in Africa, a long, long time ago, folks were pretty much all pagen. And one of the little things just about all of those pagen religions had in common was that they circumcized their guys. And AIDS was unknown back then. It wasn't until the Christian missionaries came on the scene and got whole tribes to stop circumcizing the men that AIDS showed up. As long as it's just women that can easily catch it, in a heterosexual society, even one that is not particularly monogamous, that disease isn't going far. Once both sexs catch it easily, it's all over the place.
In other words, you know all those crazy old traditions your folks passed on to you? Don't get rid of them until you figure out what the consequences will be! Something like that, which got religicized over the eons, a little thing like that, could've stopped HIV in its tracks. And probably did for a long time. But when folks changed religions, became Christians, the missionaries discouraged that practice as a link to paganism. Sure, change your religion, when you find the Truth, but take a close look at what you were doing before, and more importantly, why, before you give up your entire lifestyle. After all, how much trouble can one of these total infected=total dead virii like Ebola cause when villages are pretty well isolated and there are only fifty or a hundred people in them?
In other words, you know all those crazy old traditions your folks passed on to you? Don't get rid of them until you figure out what the consequences will be! Something like that, which got religicized over the eons, a little thing like that, could've stopped HIV in its tracks. And probably did for a long time. But when folks changed religions, became Christians, the missionaries discouraged that practice as a link to paganism. Sure, change your religion, when you find the Truth, but take a close look at what you were doing before, and more importantly, why, before you give up your entire lifestyle. After all, how much trouble can one of these total infected=total dead virii like Ebola cause when villages are pretty well isolated and there are only fifty or a hundred people in them?
posted by BoysMom @ 9:20 PM
1 Comments:
At 10:05 PM, July 09, 2005,
Anonymous said…
As a biologist and a Christian, I think you are seriously reaching if you believe that being uncircumsised was going to stop the spread of HIV in it's proverbial tracts. There are many factors into why women don't get or transmit this disease as easily as men do. The fact that they are raping young girls as a cure is another big reason for the spread (the girls are more likely to bleed as a result of the rape - since they need to be virgins for this supposed cure to work- and the disease is therefore spead more easily that way). There are too many reasons for the wide spread of HIV in Africa to try to pin it on this one thing.
Spacebunny
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