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HIV and Sex: Fallacy of the Single Cause

1 Comment Posted by on October 29, 2017

The four Kenyan counties of Kisumu, Homa Bay, Siaya and Migori that I mentioned in my last blog post have been in the news following the rerun of the presidential elections on Thursday 26 October. Voting in these four counties was suspended at an early stage and scheduled to resume on Saturday 28, but they did not go ahead.

The result of the presidential elections held in August was disputed in court, hence the rerun. But the opposition leader, Raila Odinga, later called for the elections to be boycotted, and turnout has been very low. The four counties in question are home to the majority of Odinga’s own Luo tribe, and a large proportion of people who might vote for him as president.

Astoundingly, one third of all of Kenya’s 1.6m HIV positive people live in these four counties, even though only about one tenth of Kenyans live there. These counties make up the bulk of the former Nyanza Province, in the southeast. In the blog post before that I wrote about a contrasting area, where 0.2% of HIV positive people live: Mandera, Garissa and Wajir, the former northwestern province, with a population of about 1.6m (3.5% of Kenya’s population).

In the earlier of these two posts I speculated that HIV prevalence in the northeastern counties may have remained low because of the geographical isolation of the area. Few roads go there, infrastructure is underdeveloped, health services are few and far between, and usage of health services tends to be low. Quality of health services is also likely to be low, but less harm can result if most people stay away from facilities.

In the southwest, where infrastructure is a bit better, usage of health services is higher. This means that a lot more people are being exposed to potentially unsafe healthcare. Over 4m people live in 10,200 km2, compared to the 1.6m people in the northeast, an area of 127,300 km2. Population density can be lower than 10/km2 in the northeast and as high as 460/km2 in the southwest.

Variations in sexual behavior don’t correlate very well with variations in HIV prevalence or distribution, so it can’t be the single or simple cause of HIV transmission. UNAIDS and other establishments involved in HIV programming claim that 80-90% of HIV transmission in high prevalence African countries is due to ‘unsafe’ sexual behavior, but they have never been able to demonstrate how such a claim could be true, or even plausible.

However, it could be argued that variation in exposure to potentially unsafe healthcare practices correlates much better with HIV transmission. Both areas are isolated politically, and have been for many decades. Low usage of health facilities and social services (and low availability) seems to be a consequence of the political isolation experienced by the northwest. It is home to many of Kenya’s ethnic Somalis, a piece of land that was formerly part of Somalia.

Down in the southwest, the politically isolated Luo population experienced a certain amount of growth and prosperity after independence, especially during the explosion in the population of Nile Perch in Lake Victoria. People with a bit more money are likely to spend some of that money on healthcare. But if that healthcare is not of high quality, is not safe, this might explain why wealthier people in high prevalence African countries tend to be more likely to be infected with HIV than poorer people.

These two geographical areas have certain things in common: they are overwhelmingly populated by one ethnic group, and have both sought to distance themselves from the rest of Kenya; there has even been talk of complete political separation. But there must also be something very different about the two areas that explains why the HIV burden is over 160 times higher in the southwest than it is in the northeast.

Search for ‘sexual reductionism’ on Google and you’ll come across a discussion about a Vermeer exhibition at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. This will give you some idea of how current HIV epidemiology seems to proceed. Apparently the texts accompanying the paintings treat every detail of the art works as being about sex.

For UNAIDS, variation in HIV prevalence is all about sex: poor people sell sex, rich people buy sex, as do employed people, women are more vulnerable to sexual exposure than men, men are more promiscuous, sexual mores are different in Muslim communities, etc. But an alternative explanation is that variation in access to potentially unsafe healthcare facilities can better account for variation in HIV prevalence within and between geographical areas.

The history of the isolation of the southwest and northeast counties of Kenya from much of the rest of the country, political, geographical, ethnic and other forms of separation, is a long and complex one. But so too is the history of the HIV epidemic, from its origins in equatorial Africa to its global spread, and the multiple causal factors that resulted in hyperendemic levels in some countries (and within some countries), but low levels in others.

AIDS, behavioral paradigm, HIV, institutional racism ,

Via Negativa: the way to low HIV prevalence?

3 Comments Posted by on October 19, 2017

Wajir is a city and county in Kenya’s former North Eastern Province. From a HIV perspective, the county stands out for having the lowest prevalence of all Kenya’s 47 counties, currently estimated at 0.4%. The next highest counties are Mandera (0.8%) and Garissa (0.9%). Wajir, Mandera and Garissa make up what was the province, formerly a part of Jubaland, in Southern Somalia.

Homa Bay is a town and county in the south west, formerly part of Nyanza Province, and the number one county for HIV prevalence, 26%. Indeed, the only counties with prevalence above 10% are Siaya (24.8%), Kisumu (19.9%), Migori (14.3%) and Homa Bay, which (along with Kisii and Nyamira) made up Nyanza. That accounts for one third of all HIV positive people in Kenya.

The question of why HIV prevalence is so high in certain parts of Kenya is usually answered, implicitly or explicitly, with half baked notions about ‘African’ sexual behavior, ‘African’ mores, ‘traditions’, sexual practices, ‘unsafe’ sex, promiscuity. In a word: sex. It’s all about sex, and in the worst hit counties experts have persuaded the US to part with hundreds of millions of dollars for mass male circumcision programs.

A lot less seems to be written about the extremely low HIV prevalence found in the north east. Look up Mandera, Garissa or Wajir on PubMed and you will only come across just over 300 papers altogether, compared to thousands for other locations (and almost 50,000 for Kenya as a whole). But it would be interesting to know how HIV prevalence has remained as low as in many western countries in the north west of Kenya, yet it has risen as high as the worst hit countries in southern Africa in the south west of Kenya.

Sex happens in north eastern counties too. In fact, condom use is generally lower in these counties. Polygamy is more common, as are intergenerational sex and marriage, phenomena the HIV industry sometimes insists are risks for HIV transmission. Knowledge about HIV transmission and how to avoid it tends to be lower in these counties, too. Birth rates are higher than in other parts of the country.

Circumcision is said to be widespread in a number of counties, not just in Wajir (and Mandera and Garissa) but also, for example, in Kilifi. But HIV prevalence in Kilifi is a lot higher, at 4.5%. The populations are predominantly Muslim in both counties, so circumcision is not likely to be the full explanation, nor is religion. There are commercial sex workers and men who have sex with men in every county, with no evidence that these practices are less common in low prevalence counties.

The north eastern counties are, in fact, very different from the rest of Kenya. Kenya was divided up on ethnic lines by the British, which is why the territory once called the ‘Northern Frontier District’ became one province: it was, and still is, populated by ethnic Somalis. They are geographically isolated, in the sense that there are few major roads. Much of the north of Kenya is arid and sparsely populated. Even the Somalis who live elsewhere in Kenya, such as in Nairobi, tend to live in predominantly Somali suburbs.

A similar kind of isolation, albeit on a much larger scale, can be found in northern Africa. The Sahara is sparsely populated and there are few major roads traversing it. HIV prevalence is low in all North African countries. In fact, HIV arrived relatively late in North Africa, and analysis of the common subtypes there suggest that the epidemic spread to a large extent from southern Europe, and to a lesser extent from West and central Africa.

The most common HIV subtype in Kenya is type A, followed by D, with a small proportion of type C. But the most common subtype in the north east of Kenya is type C, this being the most common subtype in southern Africa, Ethiopia and a number of other countries. So the former province really does seem to have a different epidemic or ‘subepidemic’. Type C is known to have evolved later than A and D, so the former North Eastern Province’s subepidemic is newer, like those in North African countries.

But it is still unclear how the above features of certain epidemics and subepidemics are associated with very low prevalence. Instead of looking for phenomena behind very high prevalence in some south western counties, are there certain phenomena that are absent in the north west (and in North Africa)? Isolation doesn’t mean less sex, nor even less ‘unsafe’ sex, and sexual behavior is very poorly correlated with HIV transmission.

We don’t know much about Wajir, Mandera and Garissa because not much research has been carried out there, and it’s not surprising that little HIV research has been carried out where there’s little HIV transmission. But what about other healthcare research? I notice almost all the articles on PubMed are about HIV, and were published in the last 20-30 years. So the area has been isolated from research for a long time.

Now, if there are few roads and limited infrastructures, is healthcare infrastructure similarly limited? It could be expected that access to healthcare facilities is poor and that many people rarely or never go to a hospital, or see any kind of health professional. The majority of women probably give birth at home, coverage of mass drug administration programs, including routine immunizations, is probably lower for these and other more isolated counties.

Borrowing Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s ‘via negativa’ in his book ‘Antifragile’, perhaps HIV prevalence in the north east of Kenya (and in North Africa) has remained low because of infrequent contact with healthcare facilities. This is not to say that healthcare facilities are unsafe in the north east, although it does suggest that they are unsafe in high prevalence counties. Also, it is suggested that HIV is circulating in health facilities, more in some than in others.

Many (including Taleb) like to repeat that ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. There is a possibility that HIV has been, and is still circulating in health facilities in Kenya, and may account for a significant proportion of infections, perhaps the majority of infections. Little research has been carried out to estimate the relative contribution of healthcare associated HIV transmission. We will never know until the evidence is sought: does limited contact with healthcare keep HIV prevalence low in the north east of Kenya?

AIDS, behavioral paradigm, HIV, nosocomial ,

Choke on it: Peak Free Lunch at HIV Inc?

1 Comment Posted by on September 7, 2017

There have been several mentions recently of significant cuts in HIV funding, including PEPFAR and the Global Fund for Aids, TB and Malaria. It is said that funding could be cut by several billion dollars per annum, even as much as one third of all funding. Should we be worried?

According to UNAIDS, funding available for low and middle income countries has grown from $4.8 billion in 2000 to $19.5 billion in 2016. During that time, deaths from Aids have dropped from a peak of 1.9 million people in 2005 to 1 million in 2016.

The number of new infections has gone from about 4.7 million in 1995 to 1.8 million in 2016 and the number accessing treatment has gone from 685,000 people in 2000 to 19.5m people in 2016. The fear is that the number of deaths will cease to drop, or even increase, as the number of people on treatment flattens out or drops.

The gains over the last 15 years are certainly impressive, especially the increases in funding. But the correlation between increases in funding and improvements in HIV indicators is not so clear. Drops in rates of new infections had started many years before, and even death rates had peaked and started to decline before funds such as PEPFAR and GPATM would have had much impact.

In fact, figures for new transmissions in some high prevalence countries started to drop in the 80s (Uganda) and 90s (Kenya and Tanzania), long before big funding and large treatment programs were available. By the 2000s, several countries with serious epidemics were already seeing a substantial downward trend (Zimbabwe), with only an occasional upward blip, such as that experienced in Uganda.

Here are some ways that a lot more could be achieved with a lot less money:

  • Trace the possible source of every new infection; every new infection is potentially the source of more than one further infection, so failure to trace sources represents one of the biggest missed opportunities of the last 30 years of providing HIV services
  • Offer non-HIV healthcare services to those who test negative (as an incentive to testing), eg, free treatment for conditions other than HIV, including STIs
  • Re-examine the relative contributions of non-sexual and sexual infection routes for HIV, which must vary considerably from country to country, even within countries
  • Re-integrate HIV clinics and services into other health facilities, getting rid of expensive parallel HIV-specific structures
  • Distribute funding at a level closer to people on the ground, such as HIV positive people and those providing services
  • Re-direct some of the remaining funding to improving safety in certain service areas, eg, maternal health
  • ‘No blame’ investigations into serious outbreaks, especially among those whose risk should be low, eg, maternal health beneficiaries, virgins, infants, etc
  • Drop failing programs, such as abstinence-only and other behavioral programs that are aimed solely at sexual behavior
  • Listen to leaders who are calling for positive change, for things to be done differently, for a re-think of some of the strategies that have been failing for a long time

Big reductions in HIV funding could be used as an opportunity to make positive changes in the way the remaining funding is spent, and allow each dollar to go much further. Country leaders need to think differently, rather than chaining themselves to strategies that have been failing for years. Massive HIV NGOs and other institutions are too far removed from individual epidemics to be able to see differences between countries and within countries.

What we should worry about is stasis: static thinking in HIV institutions, static research focus in universities, static behavior in health facilities, static attitudes that have not moved on from the sensationalist finger-pointing of the 1980s. Static or falling funding is irrelevant so long as HIV spending remains independent of what’s happening on the ground. A radical drop in funding may bring about the very changes that have been wanting for decades.

AIDS, HIV, institutional racism, unsafe healthcare , , , , ,

Voice of America: Masters of Clickbait

1 Comment Posted by on August 24, 2017

According to an article in Voice of America “Women and girls as young as 12 from Kenya’s countryside are being forced into sex work to support families affected by prolonged drought.” The title of the article calls this ‘survival sex’, a popular media trope. The article goes on to claim that the area in question here, Turkana, “suffers from Kenya’s second-highest HIV infection rate”, and attributes this to the IRC (International Rescue Committee).

This popular coupling of sex and HIV, spiced up with mentions of sex tourism, underage girls and the ‘survival’ element, is ubiquitous in the media. Even specialist publications about HIV seem obsessed with sexually transmitted HIV, to the exclusion of infections through unsafe healthcare, cosmetic care and traditional practices, which can all run the risk of coming into contact with blood. This can result in transmission of viruses such as HIV, hepatitis C and various others.

Two questions arise from this VOA article alone: first, what proportion of HIV is transmitted through sex, and what proportion is transmitted through other, non-sexual routes? And second, what is the relationship between food shortages and poverty in general on the one hand, and risky sexual behavior on the other?

In answer to the first question, VOA or the IRC, whoever came up with the figure, is wrong about Turkana having the second highest HIV prevalence in Kenya. The highest prevalence figures can be found around Lake Victoria, with Homa Bay having the highest, at 26%. National prevalence is said to be 5.9%. In comparison, prevalence in Turkana is 4%, and is claimed to have halved in the past few years.

Which leads to the answer to the second question: if poverty and food shortages have been increasing in Turkana for the last few years and HIV prevalence has been dropping, that may suggest that the correlation between the two is negative. Of course, what we really need to know is whether incidence, the percentage of new infections, is increasing or decreasing (along with an indication of how all these people are being infected, of course).

The VOA article goes on to mention sex tourism, ‘survival sex’, child sex, how little money those involved make, how they are exploited and often make no money at all. It’s extraordinary how data collectors can know so much, apparently, and yet still know next to nothing about how people are being infected. Immense amounts of data are regularly collected about sexual behavior in high HIV prevalence countries, always showing that the majority of people have sex, but also showing that only a minority have a lot of sex, a lot of partners, engage in practices considered risky, etc (you’ll find hundreds of reports on the DHS website).

The article mentions another dubious figure, this time from UNICEF: “In 2008, the United Nations Children’s Fund estimated that 30 percent of girls in coastal Kenya were forced into prostitution.” This makes it sound like 30% of all girls in coastal areas are forced into prostitution; the claim is probably that 30% of people working in prostitution were forced. The second version is still highly questionable, though typical of UN offices, but the first version is simply not credible.

There is no intention to dispute claims that there are food shortages, poverty, prostitution, HIV and many other severe problems in Kenya and elsewhere. But the desperate attempt to connect HIV with sex, and adding in as many shocking practices as possible to help readers swallow the claim, distracts attention from how people are being infected; it distracts attention from unsafe and insanitary conditions in healthcare facilities (and, probably to a lesser extent, from dangerous cosmetic and traditional practices).

This VOA article is disingenuous in not checking its claims against readily available data. The IRC, like all international NGOs, is anxious to increase funding, and reducing HIV transmission, poverty and food insecurity are all laudable aims. But the sloppy sensationalism in the article also leaves the impression that the claimed concerns about the dangers of ‘survival sex’, child sex tourism and child prostitution are being inflated for fundraising purposes. It also raises important doubts about what proportion of HIV is sexually transmitted.

behavioral paradigm, HIV, institutional racism, media racism , , ,

Drugs for All Deemed More Profitable than Circumcision

Comments Off on Drugs for All Deemed More Profitable than Circumcision Posted by on March 22, 2017

Demands to roll out mass male circumcision programs, claimed to reduce HIV transmission, date back at least 20 years. Other claims about the ‘benefits’ of circumcision go back centuries. But by the time the programs had started several other interventions had been identified that have a far better claim to reduce HIV transmission.

For example, ‘test and treat’, the practice of putting everyone who tests positive for HIV on ARVs immediately, is claimed to reduce transmission to a HIV negative sexual partner by 96% or higher. (Note, 90 is something of a magic number in UNAIDSland at the moment, with their 90-90-90 strategy replacing various other magic numbers conjured up in the past.)

PrEP, the practice of giving ARVs to HIV negative people who are thought to be at risk of infection with the virus, is also claimed to reduce transmission to a HIV negative partner by 96%.

If the number of HIV positive people in the world is something around 30 million, depending on which estimates you use, and about half of them are claimed to be on ARVs already, there are still around 15 million who can benefit from ARVs. That’s worth, say, a few billion dollars.

Although a lot of those opposed to mass male circumcision don’t seem to realize this, many of those promoting circumcision are the same people who promoted behavior based programs, particularly those with an emphasis on ‘abstinence’. Those programs, although they never completely died out, were a disaster. Even the people formerly pushing them now admit that they probably had no impact on HIV transmission. But they wanted to find another source of funding to replace the vast amounts that used to go into ‘prevention’, a lot of which was spent on behavior based rubbish.

Circumcision seemed like the answer because the number of people who could be targeted for circumcision could run into hundreds of millions. Every year millions more male children would be available to keep the programs profitable.

At first the promoters claimed they were only targeting sexually active adults, but they quickly found that most of them didn’t want to be circumcised. It was much easier to recruit children and now they can turn their attention to infants.

But with test and treat, coupled with PrEP, how can the circumcision enthusiasts still claim that there is any benefit to the operation? They need to target almost the entire male population in countries where circumcision is not widely practiced. They must carry out the operation on about 75 men for every one claimed reduction in HIV transmission.

The other interventions, test and treat and PrEP, are claimed to be targeted at those most at risk. Let’s take a look at who is thought to be most at risk, and see just how many hundreds of millions of people that involves, who would need to be taking these drugs for the rest of their lives in the case of test and treat, and for as long as they are thought to be at risk for PrEP.

In western countries there are few groups who are thought to be at risk. The biggest group is men who have sex with men. The second biggest group is injecting drug users. But aside from commercial sex workers, who are given some choice in prevention options in many rich countries, there are not many others.

The picture is completely different in southern and eastern African countries, with high prevalence and/or large numbers of people infected with HIV. This article about a PrEP program in Kenya says the groups of people claimed to face the highest risk of being infected include:

  1. Discordant couples (where one partner is HIV positive and one is HIV negative)
  2. People who frequently contract sexually transmitted infections
  3. People who are said to be unable to ‘negotiate’ condom use
  4. People who frequently use post-exposure prophylaxis (a short course of ARVs for people who suspect they may have been infected, taken within 72 hours of contact)
  5. People who share injecting equipment

Out of the estimated 77,600 new infections in Kenya it is not clear how many arose among any of the listed ‘risk’ groups. High prevalence countries tend not to trace contacts, assuming that the bulk of transmissions (about 90% if you exclude infants said to have been infected by their mothers) were a result of heterosexual intercourse.

You could easily add other risks to the above list, for example (most of the following are a risk in developing countries although 7, 10 and 12 are likely to be more common in rich countries):

  1. People who have given birth in a health center/clinic
  2. People who have given birth at home, or anywhere other than in a health center/clinic
  3. People who have received birth control injections
  4. People who have had injections, blood tests, transfusions, dental care, infusions, etc
  5. People who have had operations that involved piercing the skin, major or minor (including circumcision)
  6. People who have received some forms of traditional healthcare that involved skin piercing
  7. People who use injected appearance or performance enhancers (eg botox, steroids, etc)
  8. People who get their head shaved or where skin is pierced and/or weakened by processes
  9. People who receive manicures, pedicures, etc
  10. People who have body piercings
  11. People who practice scarification and other practices
  12. People who get tattoos

Of course, with the second list, you could warn people about the risks and clean up health centers, cosmetic establishments and anywhere skin piercing occurs (the list is surprisingly long). This would seem preferable to putting almost everyone in a population on expensive drugs for many years.

But UNAIDS, CDC, WHO and other establishments object to calls to warn people about the risks they face in health and cosmetic facilities in developing countries. They warn some people from rich countries about the risks in poor countries but they refuse to warn people in poor countries.

Even concentrating on the risks listed in the Kenya article it is easy to identify many millions of people who could be said to need the $775 per annum PrEP, which is the estimated cost of the drugs alone (I don’t know what other costs there may be).

So you can see the attraction for the HIV industry. If there were only 5 million people requiring years of ARVs, for some, a lifetime of ARVs, that’s several billion dollars for Kenya alone. There are countries with higher prevalence and others with higher numbers of people infected than Kenya.

With only a few billion dollars for mass male circumcision, with its 1.3% absolute risk reduction, or even the claimed 60% relative risk reduction, drugs for the sick and the well seems like a far more lucrative strategy. Even if the benefits realized for mass male circumcision far exceed those unlikely claims, they can’t come close to the claimed benefits of test and treat and those of PrEP.

One problem is that you can’t roll out PrEP for many of the groups claimed to benefit. For example, in discordant couples the positive partner should already be receiving ARVs. People who share injecting equipment could be better served by a clean syringe and needle program. There may be other examples, where overlapping PrEP and test and treat might raise eyebrows among the more scrupulous in the industry.

And it would be perverse to give PrEP to people while they still attend clinics and other places where skin piercing procedures take place without warning them about the risks and also ensuring that those places start to abide by strict infection control regulations that people in rich countries (and rich people in poor countries) enjoy.

If PrEP and test and treat strategies are as wonderful as we are told, let’s hope they do as well in the field as they did in trials. But let’s also get rid of these silly mass male circumcision programs. We no longer have to pretend that they will reduce HIV transmission, or even pretend that that’s why they were rolled out in the first place. Worse still, the profits are orders of magnitude lower than the drug based strategies.

behavioral paradigm, circumcision, HIV, institutional racism, male genital mutilation, mass male circumcision, unsafe healthcare, VMMC , ,

HIV Transmission Via Unsafe Medical Injections in Kenya – Significant Risk

3 Comments Posted by on June 11, 2014

Congratulations to Kenya on being one of the first African countries with a serious HIV epidemic to investigate the role of unsafe healthcare and reuse of injecting equipment in transmitting HIV. The study finds that “Men who had received ≥1 injection in the past 12 months (adjusted odds ratio, 3.2; 95% CI: 1.2 to 8.9) and women who had received an injection in the past 12 months, not for family planning purposes (adjusted odds ratio, 2.6; 95% CI: 1.2 to 5.5), were significantly more likely to be HIV infected compared with those who had not received medical injection in the past 12 months.”

But these findings make the conclusion of the article all the more striking: “Injection preference [my emphasis] may contribute to high rates of injections in Kenya.” If someone is infected with HIV as a result of receiving an injection, then it is the behavior of the health care practitioner that is at fault, not the ‘preference’ of the patient. Health facilities make more money from procedures such as injections than they do from just giving advice or handing out prescriptions, so there may be good reasons why patients ‘prefer’ injections; they may have been led to believe that injections are ‘better’. I’d also be surprised if mere patient preference made much difference to the kind of treatment a patient received in Kenya or elsewhere in East Africa.

Those providing health services need to take responsibility for healthcare associated HIV transmission, and that includes Ministries of Health, professional bodies, and also the WHO, UNAIDS, CDC and other parties who have dominated health and HIV policy in high HIV prevalence countries for decades. Reuse of syringes, needles and other skin piercing equipment carries a very high risk of transmission of HIV, hepatitis and other pathogens. It is not enough to blame patients for their ‘preferences’. Practitioners can decide what treatment a patient needs and what is the best means of administering it, if that means is available to them.

The paper recommends that “community- and facility-based injection safety strategies be integrated in disease prevention programs”. If this is UN-speak for the need to accept that HIV is frequently transmitted through unsafe healthcare and these practices need to stop, then I wholeheartedly agree. This is more than thirty years too late, but it’s good to hear the very mention of non-sexually transmitted HIV in the form of unsafe healthcare being taken seriously in a peer-reviewed journal. I look forward to hearing of other high HIV prevalence countries making the same ‘discovery’ and publicizing it, and also taking steps to reducing such transmission risks.

[To read more about HIV transmission through unsafe healthcare, have a look at the Don’t Get Stuck With HIV site’s Healthcare Risks for HIV pages.]

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , , , ,

US College Students Practice Using Sex in Advertising in Kenya

Comments Off on US College Students Practice Using Sex in Advertising in Kenya Posted by on June 7, 2014

Some US college students have set up a fake profile on Tinder to “turns flirty conversation into a serious talk about men’s health for the month of June, which is Men’s Health Month in the US”. I’m not sure what that has to do with Kenya, but their work is described as “talking dirty to dirtbags”, so they are certainly in tune with the HIV industry’s ‘all men are bastards, all women are victims’ mentality.

But I thought the US had learned its lesson from other ‘fake’ campaigns; perhaps not.

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , ,

Mass Male Circumcision: Western Sponsored Institutionalized Racism

11 Comments Posted by on April 21, 2014

Malawi News Agency has put out a fatuous ‘article’ about a journalist who has been duped into being circumcised in an effort to persuade others to follow his ‘example’. This reminds me that about 6 months ago I blogged about a misinformation service called Internews, connected with the rather smug Gates Foundation and the BBC. Internews boasts about being able to ensure that only ‘positive’ coverage of the US Government’s mass male circumcision program in African countries with medium to high HIV prevalence appears on African news sources.

This Malawian journalist was, apparently, persuaded also by the fact that circumcision is said to protect against human papilloma virus (HPV), although the evidence for this is even slimmer than that relating to HIV. More importantly, many African countries are already receiving assistance to vaccinate millions of Africans against HPV (currently being piloted), so why promote mass male circumcision as well? Are they afraid the HPV vaccination will not give as much protection as their promotional literature claims?

However this journalist was either too innocent, or too well paid off, to check available figures for HIV prevalence among circumcised and uncircumcised men in Malawi. In 2010 HIV prevalence was 14% among circumcised men and only 10% among uncircumcised men. This makes it look as if not being circumcised is protective. But things get a lot worse if you look at the three regions of Malawi, where HIV prevalence and circumcision are very clearly correlated:

Malawi (2)

How much clearer could this be? It is even possible to view these figures for Malawi another way. A 2013 article entitled ‘Mapping HIV clustering: a strategy for identifying populations at high risk of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa‘, using the same data (from the 2010 Demographic and Health Survey) identified three major HIV ‘clusters’ in Malawi. The cluster in the North and the one in the center of the country were of relatively low HIV prevalence, where circumcision rates are low. The cluster in the South of the country was of high HIV prevalence, where circumcision rates are high.

Internews and their collaborators would not wish anyone to mention this in a national newspaper, as their express aim is to ensure that only positive coverage about mass male circumcision and HIV transmission sees the light of day; or at least that those who are being told these lies and deceptions don’t know that there are things about circumcision they would be well advised to research. Reading a newspaper that has been bought off by some misinformation service is not research.

The article is full of the usual anecdotal rubbish about mass male circumcision, including some deluded victim of Internews and Co. (also a journalist) who had a problem with penetrative intercourse before being circumcised, the old chestnut about circumcision making people “clean and free of bad odours” (despite making it clear that some of these people suffering from bad odors ‘wear the same underwear for several days), sex being better, etc.

Several times the official claim about mass male circumcision is repeated, that it only ‘gives 60% protection, that people still need to use condoms’ and the usual claptrap. The article even points out that circumcision rates are high in the South and low in the other two regions. But, and this is the clever Internews bit, they don’t bother mentioning that HIV prevalence in the country is highest where circumcision is more widely practiced and lowest where circumcision is less widely practiced.

One of the biggest worries about mass male circumcision is that being circumcised only sometimes appears to be correlated with lower HIV prevalence; just as frequently it appears to be correlated with higher HIV prevalence. Given that there is no known mechanism by which circumcision could protect against HIV infection (only a handful of vague protohypotheses), these differences make it clear that there is a lot more to HIV transmission than circumcision status.

The clear message about mass male circumcision and HIV being payrolled by Internews, Gates Foundation, UNAIDS, PEPFAR and the likes is that Africans are promiscuous, reckless, ignorant and unhygienic; this kind of neo-imperialist institutionalized racism is par for the course in the HIV industry (yes, it is an industry, just like development) and would be condemned as such in most western countries (aside from the US, and perhaps the UK, apparently). So why do we find it acceptable to allow people in high HIV prevalence countries to be systematically deceived?

AIDS, blood, HIV, iatrogenic, nosocomial , , , , , , , , , , , , ,