It just seems bizarre to me that every couple of years there is a major research paper from US doctors that gives the thumbs-up to male circumcision, which is always based on research in third-world countries, and which trots out the same tired old, thoroughly refuted, myths about health benefits and apparently no bad stuff, whilst carefully ignoring the moral issues.
The UTI rate for uncircumcised boys is the same as for girls but we don't see them recommending slicing off perfectly good flesh from baby girls' genitals. The claimed reduction in the infection rate is 15% but it's 15% of 1.5% which brings it down to 1.275% - so it's an absolute reduction of only 0.225%.
Then there's the thing that UTIs aren't particularly bad and are readily treatable like so many other disease. Should we cut off babies' toes to help prevent athlete's foot or remove their breast tissue to avoid breast cancer which has a much greater rate than UTIs and is much nastier? Of course not.
The fact is that "routine" male neonatal circumcision is a procedure that people have been trying to justify maintaining for the last 100 years. Every time the old bollocks is finally knocked on the head (preventing masturbation; curing hysteria, mental illness, epilepsy, asthma; preventing penile cancer; etc) something new pops up as the reason to keep on mutilating baby boys' penises. Seriously, if this didn't exist and somebody suggested it, they would be disgraced (and prob net-flamed), and if anyone actually went ahead and did it, they would be sent to gaol.
If it really has a such a positive effect on STD and HIV infection rates in westernised countries, why is it that the rates for STDs in the US are slightly higher than in Europe, and rates for HIV much higher?
This is driven by cultural bias and money. The doctors want their $ for performing the surgery, the hospitals want their $ for selling the foreskins, and big pharma wants their $ for selling expensive face-creams made from babies' foreskins.
