2012-05-12 psihealthylives.com - Infant Circumcision: A tipping point for HIV prevention

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Infant Circumcision: A tipping point for HIV prevention
- Emma Llewellyn, HIV services director for PSI/Swaziland


On June 26 of last year, Jabu Qwabe and Thokozani Mndzebele celebrated the birth of their new baby boy, Sihlelelwe, at a small hospital outside of Mankayane, Swaziland. Like all new parents, they immediately began to dream about their son’s future—where he would go to school, what he would study, what his career would be. Above all, they dreamed for him to live a healthy life—which is why, before leaving the hospital, they made the decision to have Sihlelelwe circumcised.

As parents of a child in Swaziland—the nation with the world’s highest adult HIV prevalence at 25.9 percent—their decision could very well save Sihlelelwe’s life. Voluntary medical male circumcision has been found to reduce the risk of sexual transmission of HIV from women to men by as much as 60 percent.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, recommend voluntary adult circumcision in high HIV-prevalence countries like Swaziland to lessen the chance for HIV’s spread. They, along with UNICEF, also recommend early-infant male circumcision (EIMC) be implemented in parallel with adult circumcision programs.

Health officials say that not only will infant circumcision help protect boys from HIV when they become sexually active later in life, but that it also protects infants and boys from serious health complications such as urinary tract infections and paraphimosis, a condition that can lead to pain and swelling in the affected area, and may require surgery.

In less than three years, the program has provided 1,300 voluntary circumcisions to boys across the tiny independent kingdom within the borders of South Africa. USAID’s support directly contributed to 1,226 of these procedures.

Infant circumcision is now offered for free in four health facilities in two of the four regions of the country, and coverage in each facility is about 25 percent of eligible baby boys. Three more facilities will begin providing EIMC in the first half of 2012, with more to be added during the latter half of the year. This network should service the entire country and the approximately 20,000 male infants born each year. The project is also training nurses to perform circumcisions—normally the purview of medical doctors only—to expand the number of infants offered the procedure.


URL: http://psihealthylives.com/2012/05/i...revention.html