Circumcision of a person without consent and without immediate medical reason should be made illegal. It's unbelievable in this day and age that it occurs and is seemed as normal, and yet people scream foul play over female circumcision.

Barbaric practice, needs to go. We don't accept unnecessary female circumcision, there is no reason to accept male. It offers significant drawbacks and no benefits to a healthy baby born into a western civilised country.

If you're likely to live and have sex with members of a population in which HIV is rife, i could see it being used to save a couple of lives out of every few hundred thousand. However if you live in a country where HIV is uncommon, circumcision is not any kind of protection - the child is not going to grow up using circumcision as a defence against STDs especially when trivial solutions exist that provide 99.999% protection. So you've taken away a wealth of nerve endings in the skin and furthermore deadened the sensitivity of the tip by exposing it to 'rough' surfaces, but there's no benefit.

That "prevention" method (above) only works in the same way as pre-emptive breast removal works. You'd only recommend it to those massively at risk.

Barbaric definitely is the word. And archaic. And the words "improper use of statistics and research to come to a poor conclusion". A bit like the fallacy of autism/immunisation that people bang on about to this very day despite it being bollocks of the highest order. Christ, even if it were true (which it categorically isn't), i'd rather my kid have ASD than die from polio or any of the other countless diseases that literally killed millions before being eradicated through immunisation.

As I recall the study that said circumcision reduces HIV was horribly flawed - the group that was circumcised was told to abstain from sex during healing and if not then to use a condom and taught in their use, while the uncircumcised group were just left to their own sexy devices.

Ultimately though this isn't a debate about science, I've been in multiple debates about it on the internet and it's always circumcised people saying it's good and uncircumcised people saying it's bad. Sure, there's occasionally lumps of science in the mud being hurled back and forth, but mostly it's just mud.

Don't misconstrue (or misunderstand) my words.

I said it's ignorant to just blindly state everyone who circumcises is barbaric and misinformed and that otherwise everyone is only possibly motivated by religious or aesthetic reasons.

The bottom line is we were not sure about doing it one way or the other, but we decided to give our boys what we know is the best chance against contracting HIV (heterosexually) among other things.

Finns probably have a lot less disease to worry about spreading around.

Yes, like everything in life, there may be valid reasons that could convince anyone to do it or to not do it. In my case, we made an informed decision that the foreskin isn't necessary and the only real consequences of it removed would be beneficial. Others don't feel that way, and that's fine. I'm not going to shove my opinion down everyone else's throat or call them names for disagreeing.

It would be nice to be afforded the same courtesy.

I've heard reports from several men who had sex before and after and said there was zero difference in sensation.

I circumcised my boys but not at all because of aesthetics, nor to "look like me", and especially not for any kind of religious reason.

We weren't dead-set against leaving them un-cut. In fact, we initially figured we'd just let them be natural.

One reason we decided to go ahead with it is we heard about lots of uncircumcised men have issues that require them to have it done later in life (e.g., phimosis, etc.), but the bigger reason was recent (at that time) studies showed strong evidence that circumcised men are at substantially lower risk for serious life-threatening diseases such as HIV and penile cancer (that results from HPV).

>> Yep, it's fucking barbaric. It is genital mutilation of children, period.

Talk about misinformation from a bunch of barbarians.

It's more barbaric to be completely close-minded, backward-thinking, and ignorant as to why there might possibly exist valid reasons to provide your children an almost 100% chance to avoid a plethora of penis-related problems and life-threatening diseases for their entire life in exchange for what's really a very minor procedure when done soon after birth.

The reasons against it? "It's fucking barbaric." Because... why again? "It just is," I'm sure is the best possible response.

The reasons in favor of it? Don't be so glib. Read the research.

Science Daily from Jan 2010:

Other epidemiological studies have shown that male circumcision is associated with significant reductions in HIV acquisition in men.

The strongest evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between circumcision and HIV risk reduction came from three randomized-control trials in sub-Saharan Africa, where the circumcision rate is relatively low and the HIV infection rate is relatively high. All three demonstrated a more than 40 percent reduction in HIV acquisition among circumcised men.

The largest of these three studies -- in Rakai, Uganda -- was led by Dr. Ronald H. Gray, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and the scientific paper's senior author. Dr. Gray's group collected penile swabs from all of the circumcision trial study participants, which provided the data for the new TGen-Johns Hopkins study.

The new study found that circumcision -- the removal of the foreskin, or prepuce, from the penis -- eliminates an area of mucous membrane and dramatically changes the penile bacterial ecosystem. Significantly, TGen's analysis of more than 40 types of bacteria, using a 16S rRNA gene-based pyrosequencing approach, suggests that the introduction of more oxygen following circumcision decreases the presence of anaerobic (non-oxygen) bacteria and increases the amount of aerobic (oxygen-required) bacteria.

HPV can also cause cancer of the penis in men. HPV infection is found in about half of all penile cancers. It’s more common in men with HIV and those who have sex with other men.

There is no approved screening test to find early signs of penile cancer. Because almost all penile cancers start under the foreskin of the penis, they may be noticed early in the course of the disease.

...

The 2 main risk factors for genital HPV infection in men are having many sex partners and not being circumcised.

The risk of being infected with HPV is strongly linked to having many sex partners.

Men who are circumcised (have had the foreskin of the penis removed) have a lower chance of getting and staying infected with HPV. Men who have not been circumcised are more likely to be infected with HPV and pass it on to their partners.

Whether he had one or not is irrelevant. The studies that were done on those who actually did have them later in life showed that it usually had either no effect on sex or actually improved it unless complications developed from the procedure (see the American Academy of Pediatrics 2012 Technical Report on Circumcision).

The benefits of newborn circumcisions are well-documented at this point (see for example the Mayo clinic's most recent report on the topic.) We know it also can reduce the risk of HIV infection in at risk populations.

Basically, if it does no harm and can actually have benefits, it's a valid medical procedure regardless of whether parents are choosing to do it for religious reasons or not.

Of course, should future research actually prove the risks outweigh the benefits then it should be stopped. We need to base these decisions on the medical evidence and not on our cultural prejudices.

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isnt the hiv virus like 10 times smaller than the pores in the latex that they use in condoms? or did they fix that issue?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'OBrien, crush, AIDS, HIV, acting, high school' to 'OBrien, crush, AIDS, HIV, acting, high school, kristen schaal' - edited by Grimm

I'm not able to do it, but *related=
http://videosift.com/video/HIV-Kills-Cancer

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I think the execs realized the value of an asshole on reality television long before Simon Cowell came across the Atlantic. The ratings boost given to MTV's 'The Real World' way back in 1994 by Puck constantly antagonizing his roommates (especially HIV-positive Pedro) surely got that ball rolling.

Every sane person have the right to own a gun. But as Jon said, we need to change the way we perceive guns. They should be like dad's nazi dishes ("American Beauty" reference): nice to look at, safe kept and used on special occasions.
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Why wasting billions and billions of dollars on cancer and HIV research. There is a very long failing history.

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just google for 'leukemia hiv' and you'll find many stories about that girl and what exactly was done.

Dunno, @Stormsinger is suggesting it isn't a real thing, just some indignation over a perhaps mole hill event. TYT does do that kind of thing like all of us do, so it wouldn't be to shocking.

Personally, though, I would think homosexuality is a large enough "anomaly" to at least be worthy of mention to the person that is getting the sample. I don't know a thing at all about the sperm donation process, I assume some kind of profile is already given to people who accept the sperm, and homosexuality seems like a genuine attribute a person should know about before you accept it. To that end (anecdotal), I heard of a blind, lesbian couple that wanted to find a blind male sperm donor to inseminate one of them to increase to likelihood of a blind child. That is all just to say choice is always a good thing to have, and edifying choices require information and freedom to act. If the FDA was mandating sperm banks to provide a profile that includes homosexuality as a listed trait of the donor (which is what I thought this video was going to be about), that is one thing, but wholesale misunderstanding of the risks of spreading HIV as it was mistakenly understood as Gay-related immune deficiency seems so folly that I almost can't believe it is true. However, being that I produce sperm well enough on my own; my own desire to google if this was a story worthy of actual merit escapes my attention span.

>> ^swedishfriend:

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
Hmmm when I read the title, I thought it was going to make at least some sense, like...since homosexuality might be genetic (though it could be epigenetic or in utero) to not allow that "anomaly" into the sperm bank. That makes at least some sense to me; this though is retarded. It makes me laugh when recollecting people wanting to put the FCC in charge of the internet...because this is the type of shit that would start happening. Perhaps not a fair comparison, but I think their respective track records are pretty similar.

It is genetic. Going with the notion that it is an anomaly, it isn't an anomaly that is medically unsafe in any way so why would it matter? If you get sperm from a clinic you must realize that there is a chance of at least some genes from the donor being expressed in the child. Are people staying away from sperm banks or are they lining up in droves?
So why FDA? who is asking for this? Business competition would lead to sperm banks with genetic controls if this is something people were clamoring for.