Circumcision is the norm in some cultures and HIV is still incurable and deadly, therefore, the possibility of using the one to prevent the other has been given far more credence than it deserves.

The recent claim that circumcision prevents HIV is only the latest in a 150-year history of its medical use against virtually every feared disease of the day, from tuberculosis to cancer. As each claim is overthrown, a new one rises, hence it is almost inevitable that HIV/AIDS should join those ranks.

The foreskin is an integral part of the penis that most men with one take for granted, rich in sensory nerves that make an important contribution to sexual function, and which, by its rolling action, contributes to both partners’ pleasure and stimulation. It also has protective functions. Cutting off the foreskin – circumcision – goes back before recorded history, and has been done for a dizzying variety of reasons, mainly magical. Where it is not already customary, the medical need for it is very rare. Complications, risks and harm, up to and including death, are measurable but usually underestimated.

The three Randomised Clinical Tests carried out in Africa have been held up as if they were the gold standard, proving it to be “a vaccine of high efficacy”; a figure of “60% protection from HIV transmission” is often cited. In fact, they took a total of 10,800 volunteers for circumcision, circumcised half immediately, and periodically tested them all for HIV (but didn’t tell them when they were infected – that would be “unethical”). After less than the planned two years, 64 (1.8%) of the circumcised volunteers had HIV, compared to 137 (2.5%) of the non-circumcised control group. That is the whole basis of the “60% protection”.

The gold standard is actually a double-blinded, placebo-controlled random test, but that would, by the nature of circumcision, be hard to carry out. Thus the experimenters’ hopes and the subjects’ desire to please the experimenters who paid them could easily distort the results. So also the loss of 673 men from the study, their HIV status unknown. Half were circumcised, but if you had endured a painful and marking operation to prevent HIV and then found you had it, wouldn’t you be more likely not to go back to the people who had done that to you?

Evidence completely overwhelming the claims of benefit could easily be buried among those unknowns. The studies assumed all transmission was heterosexual, while sex between men is stigmatized and underreported in Africa, and “needle men” on street corners offer an injection for every ailment - from the same needle.

The studies show no protection for women (in fact, greater risk if infected men have sex before their wound has fully healed), but the researchers are happy to calculate “indirect benefits” to women via fewer men becoming infected. The same few researchers have done all the pro-circumcision studies. They multiplied their results by the population of Africa to prove that “millions could be saved”, and asked the men about their sex lives and subsequent behaviour to prove that the former is not impaired and the latter is no more risky. Their measures of sexual satisfaction were so coarse that virtually 100% of the men seemed to enjoy perfect sex, circumcised or not! Something’s very wrong there.