The Checkup

Health in the News and in Your Life

Circumcise Your Son?

There's new evidence that men who are circumcised are less likely to get infected with sexually transmitted viruses, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Previous research had found that men who were circumcised were 50 to 60 percent less likely to get infected with the AIDS virus. Now, researchers have found that circumcision also significantly reduces a man's risk of being infected with the herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), which causes genital herpes, and the human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause genital warts in men and cervical cancer in women.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Health in Baltimore and at the Rakai Health Sciences Program and Makerere University in Uganda examined data collected by two studies involving 3,393 men in Uganda ages 15 to 49.

-- Rob Stein

Mazarin wrote:

I thought about it for a very long time when I found out I was pregnant with a boy. It came down to two things:

1. The earliest studies about the decrease in HPV, HIV and STD transmission rates were coming out at the time. All signs pointed to circumcision reducing these things.