You can't just talk about circumcision "reducing the rate" of this or that disease, without saying from what, to what. It turns out that the NNT (Number Needed to Treat, for all us ignorant non-doctors) is in the hundreds or thousands for most the of diseases it is done for. By the circumcisionists' own figures, 991 of every 1000 circumcisions to prevent Urinary Tract Infections are wasted, one on a boy who will get UTI anyway, 990 on boys who will never get them. (While the ~40/1000 girls who get UTI are, of course, treated without surgery.)
The (rest of the) English-speaking world tried the circumcision experiment, declared it a failure and gave it up. There has been no outbreak of any of the things circumcision was supposed to be good for. Europe, Scandinavia, South America have never adopted it and, where other demographic factors are equal, enjoy just as good health as the US.
The epidemiology of circumcision, now, that is one of the curiosities of the modern world. It's largely passed on from father to son (carried on the Y chromosome maybe, along with unwillingness to use maps or give up the remote?), but it spread from the US to South Korea in the 1950s, and is still epidemic there.
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You can't just talk about circumcision "reducing the rate" of this or that disease, without saying from what, to what. It turns out that the NNT (Number Needed to Treat, for all us ignorant non-doctors) is in the hundreds or thousands for most the of diseases it is done for. By the circumcisionists' own figures, 991 of every 1000 circumcisions to prevent Urinary Tract Infections are wasted, one on a boy who will get UTI anyway, 990 on boys who will never get them. (While the ~40/1000 girls who get UTI are, of course, treated without surgery.)
The (rest of the) English-speaking world tried the circumcision experiment, declared it a failure and gave it up. There has been no outbreak of any of the things circumcision was supposed to be good for. Europe, Scandinavia, South America have never adopted it and, where other demographic factors are equal, enjoy just as good health as the US.
The epidemiology of circumcision, now, that is one of the curiosities of the modern world. It's largely passed on from father to son (carried on the Y chromosome maybe, along with unwillingness to use maps or give up the remote?), but it spread from the US to South Korea in the 1950s, and is still epidemic there.
March 24, 2010 - 9:01pmThis Comment
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