Mary wasn't a virgin and circumcision prevents HIV.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I got to do one of my favorite things this morning: Eat a big breakfast while reading the newspaper. Simple, but I don’t get many Weekend Edition newspaper with adverts and comics living abroad. But I’m in South Africa for awhile, and today I picked up a thick 'ol stack of paper and started in on the eggs, bacon, sausages and toast. Aaaah, it’s gonna be a good day!

Anywho, back to the OP. In the Weekend Argus, Cape Town’s English newspaper, I read a few things that I must have missed in my CNN dripfeed. It seems that they are getting ready to publish the Dead Sea Scrolls soon. I’ve heard that these things are controversial, but man, this one caught me off-guard: The Greeks mis-translated the Hebrew word for ‘young woman’ as ‘virgin’ when they were doing the Bible. They also report that the Bible was “not a fixed text, but was edited and adjusted to make the text more relevant to its audience.” Supposedly the Vatican is going to revise parts of the Bible over the next 5 years because of the scrolls. I wonder if they will change the Virgin Mary to just plain 'ol Mary? Doubt it.

South Africa’s Medical Research Council has been doing some studies and seems to have found that in places where circumcision is the norm, HIV rates are lower. The article is poorly written, so I can’t gather how the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp (sponsered by the UN Aids programme) helped this study out, but they are mentioned as conducting studies in high and low HIV rate cities.

Anyway, The HIV infection rate among males in KwaZulu-Natal is the highest at 22.9%. Strangely enough, circumcision is not normal there. Whereas in the poorest part of South Africa, the Eastern Cape (where there is conjecture that rates should be higher, especially according to Mbeki’s theory on Aids :rolleyes: ), circumcision is normal and the rate is only 3%. AS for Africa as a whole, the rates are similar- over 20% for non-circumcised countries, around 3% in countries where it is normal practice.

Now, my WAG: I would have to say that, IF this is true, it has to do with the culture of circumcision, not the physics of it. The article suggests that giving men the chop would reduce the risk by up to 75%. I wonder if it is just that circumcision is more of a cultural/religious thing, so people from those areas possibly practice less homosexual/anal sex, maybe tend to be in more monogomous relationships, etc. But then again, I could be wrong. Maybe that little fold provides a safe breeding ground for the HIV, which then gets in the peehole and infects the individual that way. But if that is true, then logic would say that all one has to do is wash after sex, and you would be fine. Which these guys probably don’t do- not everyone has ready access to water nearby. Bathing is not a daily thing here among the poor.

Well, back to the paper. I have to read about all of the rapes and robberies before I can get to the funnies. Maybe reading papers while eating breakfast isn’t such the best thing after all.

Take care-
-Thomas

2

Wonder if JDT reads the same papers?

3

Maybe that coffee hasn’t kicked in yet…

Huh?

I assumed someone named JDT posted something similar, but I just did a quick search in the forums and came up with squat.

-Tcat

4

He’s making a reference to Jack Dean Tyler. Banned about a year or so ago. Quite a tired story. If he still lurks here I bet he gets a kick out of the fact that people still bring him up constantly after this long.

5

Within the foreskin there are a group off cells whose role is to capture infectious organisms, draw them into the lymph nodes for attack by the immune system, but this is exactly the vehicle that HIV uses to get into the body.

Lose the foreskin and you lose these cells, and one route of HIV infection is taken out.

I saw a tv prog, maybe it was Horizon or somesuch, and when rates of HIV infection were plotted on a map and then overlaid with a transparency of areas that practised circumcision, the correlation between the lowest rates and circumcision was very striking.

Here are some links for you to peruse,

http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/2754/chicago061500.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/health/newsid_1025000/1025314.stm

http://www.ucsf.edu/daybreak/1999/11/19_circumcision.html

The problem is that you can do a search and find some who believe exactly the opposite of this, but since the effect of Lanaghan cells drawing in HIV is reproducible in the laboratory I would tend to trust the pro-circumcsion lobby.

One effect of circumcision is that the glans develops a thicker layer of Keratin which is a known barrier to biological agents, so you have effectivly a doubly protective effect from circumcision.

6

I got to spend time this weekend with Prof. Nicoli Natrass from the University of Cape Town. She is one of the main people fighting with the ANC to provide women with drugs to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child. And I do mean fighting- she was presenting in front of the government last month and got read the riot act by junior members trying to improve their standing with the elder ANC folks. She has found that in no uncertain terms, it is more economical to provide the drugs than to treat the babies and mothers afterward. But they don’t want to listen because they think it is the thin edge of the wedge, and also because Mbeki is essentially nuts when it comes to AIDS. She believes that he will go down in history as killing and damaging more blacks in South Africa than Apartheid did.

Anywho, she confimed the circumcision stats as true. When they compared the Zulu’s and Xhosa (both major groups of migrant workers) the Zulu’s had an infection rate of almost 30% compared to the Xhosa’s under 5%. Zulu’s weren’t circumcized, the Xhosa were. It is also due to the fact that Zulu’s prefer ‘dry-sex’ where women fill their hoo-ha’s with detergents and chemicals to dry themselves out. EEwww!

-Tcat

7

Bloody hell. You always know it’s “silly season” when the trolls appear en masse on the messageboards, the newspapers have “guest” columnists, and the only thing on TV is live sport or repeats of every single goddamn “reality” show every made and every bad sitcom. (yes, you’re right, I’m just alittle bit bitter about the sitcom thing - channel 10 has been rotating “The Nanny”, “Seinfeld”, and “Roseanne” in the 7pm timeslot for years. It’s a little sad when we get “Seinfeld” repeats in ratings season and they are replaced by repeats of “The Nanny” in non-ratings season. Who in the hell are the people who keep phoning the network and asking for these programmes to be repeated (and what are their addresses)?

8

What-the-huh?!?!

9

This has been debated off and on before, in fact I started a thread about it a while ago, probably so long ago that the thread is gone so I won’t search for it.

IIRC, the conclusion that was reached was a definite “maybe”; the original Hebrew word could have meant either “virgin” or simply “young woman”.

10

casdave nails it. The show is playing on TLC. It’s Circumcision vs AIDS. I watched it a couple of days ago. I guess for balance the producers gave a couple of minutes of airtime to a group that is strongly anti-circumcision. Listen to the black guy. He calls circumcision a “holocaust”. Does anyone know if JDT was a black guy?