Category Archives: medical

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, medical, science, thoughts

Mass Circumcision to Fight AIDS

Here we go! I did warn you.

There was a BBC News item yesterday under the above title tells of a mass programme to circumcise males in Africa because doing so reduces AIDS rates (in males!) by 60%.

Effectively they start by “offering” the procedure to all boys born in hospital. But how long will it before adult & adolescent males are being “offered” the operation; just as men in India were bribed into vasectomies some years back. I put “offering” in quotes because I have no doubt that the offer will be heavy handed and not exactly optional.

I find this type of attitude obscene in today’s world (no, any world). Mutilation of someone, for any reason, when they themselves cannot opt out is to me a violation of human rights and an abuse. The medical profession really should know better. There would be outrage if the equivalent operation was “offered” to females — indeed there is outrage, because it is done to females (tho’ not as an anti-AIDS measure).

Oh yes, and what about the women? Circumcising men does nothing to reduce the chances of a female catching AIDS from an infected male.

Come on guys. Let’s have some medical responsibility — in the round! A little holistic thinking. Let’s find proper ways to tackle AIDS and not resort to barbaric, medieval, mutilation. And let’s stop name-calling against those who don’t agree with you, too.

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, medical, science

Circumcision and Morality

2 Comments

Two pieces I picked up from this week’s New Scientist. First a report of moves to “encourage” male circumcision:

New York is […] considering whether promoting circumcision among the city’s men might help limit the spread of HIV there. The procedure has worked wonders in Africa, cutting the infection rate by 60 per cent in circumcised Ugandans, Kenyans and South Africans compared with their intact compatriots. On 28 March, the World Health Organization and UNAIDS endorsed it as a means of reducing HIV spread.
So far […] the procedure has only been shown to work in Africa and in men who only have sex with women. So could a similar strategy work in New York, where sex between men and infection through intravenous drug use are more prevalent?

As this quote implies male circumcision isn’t just actively under consideration in NY but also in the whole of Africa. And now to female circumcision:

The painful and dangerous practice of female circumcision has been outlawed in […]Eritrea, where around 94 per cent of women are circumcised […] anyone who requests, incites or promotes female genital mutilation [will] be punished with a fine and imprisonment.

I appreciate that there is a difference of scale between male and female circumcision, but it seems to me there is a disconnect here. How can it be immoral to (seek to) mutilate female genitalia but yet moral to (seek to) mutilate the male penis?

Yes, OK, male circumcision may reduce the incidence of HIV amongst a defined section of the population: males who have sex with females without condoms. But it worries me that there is clearly going to be (political, medical and peer) pressure applied to men to get circumcised, and on parents to have baby boys circumcised. Worse I can see circumcision of male babies becoming an unquestioned part of perinatal care with parents not even being asked if they consent. And for adult men (at least in Africa) I can foresee the scenario there was in India some years ago where men were effectively bribed to have vasectomies. If I choose circumcision of my own free will, then fine. But how dare the medical profession, let alone politicians, decree that I must (or even should)? And how dare parents inflict it on a baby? If the same situation was being applied to women there would be the most almighty outcry — and rightly.

Let’s stand by our human rights and be very clear that all body mutilation (whether medically induced or not) which is not chosen of the subject’s own free will is immoral and (probably) illegal under international law.

When will politicians and the medical profession learn?

(Oh and by the way, no I’m not circumcised and I’m very glad my parents didn’t inflict it on me.)

medical, memes, science

Friday Five: Plague

1. How are you feeling?
Grumpy. I’ve had this horrid fluey coldy virus on and off since last November (see here); can’t shake it off. Now on the second round of antibiotics in the hope they’ll kill off the edges so I can kill off the rest.

2. When is the last time you went to the doctor?
Yesterday. See above. But then as I have type II diabetes I get checked up on by the medics far too often.

3. Ever broken a bone?
Nope, but come pretty close a couple or three times.

4. Ever had surgery?
Yes, several times, tho’ nothing horrid or really major: appendectomy, sinus operation, arthroscopy on both knees (at different times), bladder exam, fingernail removal, vasectomy. Didn’t enjoy the appendectomy ‘cos it was a long time ago and anaesthetics weren’t so good so I felt grim afterwards. Most of the others have been interesting experiences though. Now how sad is that?! 🙂

5. When is the last time you were in a hospital?
Last August when I had a fingernail permanently removed, although it was only day-care and under (heavy) local anaesthetic.

[Brought to you courtesy of Friday Fiver]

beliefs, environment, medical, science

Thought-provoking Science

There have been a number of interesting articles recently in the more popular scientific magazines.

First of all, catching up on the December 2006 issue of Scientific American, there was a one page item by Michael Shermer “Bowling for God” in which he asks “Is religion good for society? Science’s definitive answer: it depends”. Along the way he supports my theory that more secular and less rigidly moral societies have lower rates of teenage pregnancy and STD infection. Shermer concludes “Moral restraints on aggressive and sexual behaviour are best reinforced by the family, be it secular or sacred”.

This week’s issue of New Scientist also contains some interesting articles. Ed Douglas, in “Better by Design” asks “If only we built more lasting relationships with the tings we buy. Could better design cure our throwaway culture?” Douglas’s thesis is that we need to go back to a culture which doesn’t throw things away and doesn’t build everything with built-in obsolescence. One way to fix our environmental problems is to build products which we cherish and can sensibly repair, and/or which can be reused and recycled when we have finished with them. Almost all products these days are ephemeral; little has a useful life of more than 6 months. And yet it wasn’t always like this. Remember the teddy bear you had, and cherished, as a child? Bet you still have it! What if we cherished all products in the same way? Yes, OK there would be fewer manufacturing jobs. But we’d see an increase in service jobs: repairing and recycling stuff. Wouldn’t this make more economic and environmental sense?

Another article I found interesting, “Under the Cover of Darkness”, is all about how animals see in the dark. Scientists have discovered that, unlike most animals which can see only in shades of grey in the dark, geckos see in colour even in low light situations.

Following that is an article on “Extreme Childbirth” and the move by some women, so called “freebirthers”, to give birth without any medical intervention whatsoever. While our forebears would not have had the medical intervention we have it seems to me that women would normally have given birth with at least a help-mate (later to become the midwife) to hand — as I believe is still the case today in primitive societies. Freebirthers don’t necessarily shun the presence of a help-mate, although there are groups who insist on being alone — something the article suggests is dangerous because of the peculiarities of human anatomy. The article even contains a box on “How to recycle a placenta”! Interesting, but not tea-table reading.

Unfortunately New Scientist doesn’t provide access to its current articles unless you subscribe, so I can’t link direct to their articles here.

medical, science, thoughts

How we know what we know

There’s a very interesting and thought provoking article in this Week’s New Scientist magazine under the above title. In it Harry Collins looks at the ways and effects of individual mavericks on mainstream science. He concludes that the mavericks do have their place and that mainstream science and scientists are often blibkered and misdirected in their responses to them. Here are a few quotes from the article:

If science were a matter of combining unambiguous data from perfectly conducted experiments with flawless theories, assessing the claims of “outsider” scientists and their maverick ideas would not be that hard. But the logic of science is not so far removed from the logic of ordinary life … and so fallible human judgement still determines what happens at the heart of even the hardest science.

… it is impossible to explore every new scientific idea to the standard set by science: there are just too many.

… after a hundred years, no one has absolutely proved the non-existence of extrasensory perception. If anything, the findings run very slightly in its favour.

No-one has definitlely proved its existence either.

Take the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism affair in the UK. Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind the furore, published some evidence in The Lancet suggesting a link between autism and measles-related virus particles in the gut. But these particles were never linked to MMR vaccine. There was word-of-mouth testimony from some parents, but no link between MMR and autism has ever been proved. Wakefield simply speculated about a relationship at a press conference – and no one has ever gone further than to hypothesise about it … Because it is so hard to prove a negative, none of this shows that there is not a hidden link between MMR and autism lurking below the statistics. But there is no evidence to show there is.

A tentative claim about, say, telepathy, can provoke a sort of fundamentalist zeal among some scientists refuting the claim, which in turn undermines their claims for science as an exemplar in a divided world. They should say merely this: “Well, it’s not inconceivable, I can’t absolutely prove you wrong, but my time is better spent doing things I judge to have more potential.”

I am also not sure how it helps if they assume omnipotence in the name of science, as Richard Dawkins did recently when he insisted that scientists must be atheists. And Stephen Hawking has been turned into a new kind of religious icon, with his books taking the place of the incomprehensible Latin Bible in our homes … The Dawkinses and the Hawkings threaten to make the hard-won victory of science over religion a pyrrhic victory by replacing old faiths with new.

Ah-ha! At last someone else has seen through Dawkins and exposes him for what he is: as big a bigot, and science fundamentalist, as any religious believer knows how to be. He claims to have an open mind. Very far from it. His mind is closed unless things conform to his fundamentalist scientific view. Bah! Humbug! Evil man!

If science is essentially ordinary life albeit conducted in extraordinary circumstances, it must contradict literal interpretations of texts that clash with its findings, but it should not claim the right to address deeper questions of existence.

medical, science

Russian Cure

As I’m currently trying to get rid of the latest vile seasonal virus, I thought I’d share a little Russian cure, which isn’t Polonium-210.

A couple of weeks ago a Russian acquaintance was telling me about the traditional Russian cure for a sore throat:

  1. Drink a large measure of neat Russian vodka. If you wish swill it around your mouth in the process and swallow slowly (if that’s possible).
  2. Wait 10 minutes.
  3. Then drink the squeezed juice of one whole fresh lemon. Oh go on, lemon juice it isn’t that bad! Again swill it round the mouth and swallow slowly.

The sore throat should miraculously disappear.

Do not be tempted to mix the vodka and lemon — they need to be taken separately as the cure is supposed to work by using the vodka to weaken/kill the bugs and the acid lemon to then wash away the debris. Hmmm. Sounds logical, but I’m not convinced. Good excuse for a couple of shots of Stolichnaya tho’. And even if it doesn’t effect a cure it ain’t going to do the sore throat a lot of good.