Recent calls by Brian Morris and friends for the introduction of routine circumcision have been dismissed by health experts as nothing more than the “blinkered ideology” that Morris has been “peddling for years.” These were the words of paediatric surgeon Dr Neil Price, commenting on a recent article that collected a pile of pro-circumcision studies in order to attack the recently-released policy of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. Meanwhile in Sydney the head of the AIDS Council of New South Wales, Nicolas Parkhill, condemned Morris’s call for mass circumcision as a response to Australia’s HIV problem, pointing out that in Australia (unlike Africa) HIV was largely confined to homosexual men and injecting drug users, neither of whom could derive any risk reduction from circumcision. “ACON does not support the implementation of male circumcision as a HIV prevention strategy in Australia,” Mr Parkhill said.

Other child health experts in New Zealand were equally dismissive. The president of the NZ Paediatric Society, Dr Rosemary Marks, said while there might be “some small benefits” arising from circumcision, they were not enough to warrant funding the procedure. “I think that’s a very long bow to draw.” Compared to the other priorities for health care, this would be very low on the list. Auckland paediatric surgeon James Hamill referred to the policy of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, that routine circumcision was not warranted in Australia or New Zealand, as the consensus among child health authorities. The benefits of circumcision (if any) had to be viewed in context, he said, remembering that Australia and New Zealand do not have the problems faced by so many impoverished and underdeveloped African countries, and that children do not run the risks encountered by sexually promiscuous adults: “We don’t live in a desert, or in a country with a high rate of HIV, so in different cultural or geographical context it may be different.”

The article by Morris and friends was published in an on-line journal called Open Journal of Preventive Medicine – an obscure, low-status publication that nobody had ever heard of until now. The article itself contains little or nothing new, but is merely a rehash of the same material that circumcision promoters have been peddling for the last decade, including totally exploded claims about lack of circumcision being a risk factor for prostate cancer. What next: circumcision as a preventive of epilepsy and a cure for brass poisoning? As one sceptic was heard to remark, just because you call an opinion “an evidence-based policy” does not mean that it is a fair-minded survey of all the relevant evidence, or that it is anything more than the personal opinion of the true believers who put their names to it.

References:  New Zealand Herald, 10 March 2012;  Gay News Network, 8 March 2012;   New Zealand Herald, 7 March 2012