re: #25 kreyagg

Mainly because I see no real benefit from the practice. The advantages most often cited are those vs STDs, but simple hygiene and condom use eliminate any advantage the circumcision could provide.
Meaning that proper hygiene + condom use + circumcision provides no advantage over just proper hygiene + condom use. Really, why is it, do you imagine that circumcision helps reduce the spread of disease. What process do you think occurs that simply washing wouldn’t do just as well.

Here you go:

“It was striking that the trials were in very different settings, but yielded consistent results,” says Ronald Gray, study leader for the Uganda trial and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. “This was the largest protective effect ever seen next to condom use,” adds Sten Vermund, director of the Institute for Global Health at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tenn. But the question remained: Why?

Microscopic examination of the foreskin yielded important clues for unraveling the benefits of circumcision. Normally, the skin provides a thick protective barrier stemming from keratin—a tough structural protein also found in hair and fingernails. But on the inner surface of the foreskin, the keratin layer is much thinner, resembling the inner lining of the mouth or eyelid more than the palm of the hand.

In uncircumcised men Langerhans cells—immune cells that are primary targets for HIV transmission—”are more richly concentrated near the surface of the foreskin,” says Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Md. Without the keratin barrier, HIV can easily access these cells in the foreskin. Following infection, Langerhans cells not only serve as reservoirs for replicating virus, but also transport the virus to nearby lymph nodes where HIV spreads to other immune cells.

It may have come to your attention that in the real world people don’t alway use condoms, and don’t always remain in faithful, monogamous relationships. Saying that people should just use condoms is like saying they should just abstain, it’s simply not realistic.