Movement Promotes Circumcision to Combat AIDS

Dr. Robert Bailey, an epidemiology professor from the University of Illinois, is helping set up the first free circumcision project in Kenya, which will offer operations at public health facilities throughout the country.  

Similar facilities are already in place in Zambia, Rwanda, Swaziland and other African countries where a large percentage of the citizens do not circumcise.

"When they remove this thing, it makes you safer," 22-year-old Elijah Ochanda told the AP as he sat in a clinic, referring to the circumcision he was about to undergo at the request of his older brother. Ochanda had lost several friends to AIDS, and has come to believe claims that circumcision can prevent men from becoming infected.

Dr. Bailey’s research in western Kenya had found infection rates were cut by 60 percent among men who were circumcised. That study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, was one of many that drove the World Health Organization (WHO) to include circumcision in its AIDS prevention strategies a year ago.

It also prompted the Kenyan government to create a task force to promote voluntary, medically safe circumcisions.

But unfortunately the issue is complex, and has become entangled in violence following the disputed presidential election in Kenya last December.

Followers of President Mwai Kibaki, whose Kikuyu tribe circumcises its men, fought with supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga, a member of the Luo tribe that does not circumcise. The rite took on political significance and Odinga’s rivals began publicly taunting that he wasn’t a complete man. In the violence that followed, many Luo were forcibly circumcised.  

The violence has subsided, but Bailey told the Associated Press it has made the new government, a power-sharing arrangement with Odinga as prime minister, hesitant of taking a public position on circumcision. The disruption had even delayed the initial launch of the task force’s project.

Nevertheless, it is significant that Ochanda has overcome issues of tradition in opting for circumcision. And the Luo tribe’s council of elders doesn’t explicitly forbid the procedure outright, but they do say it is contrary to their traditions and are concerned it will encourage promiscuity.

"If you want to do that on your own, no one will question you, but it is not our custom," elder Odungi Randa told the AP.