Jaajef wa G-L, I recieved this through another mailing list and thought it was interesting enough to pass on... Yeenduleen ak jaama Tony > > >> Assalamualaikum, >> >> May I inform you about a press-release which reads: >> >> Circumcision protects men from HIV >> >> Circumcision may somehow protect men from sexual transmission of the >> AIDS virus, researchers said on Sunday, but they admitted they do >> not have a clue why. > > A study in Uganda aimed at examining how couples infect one another > found two things which seemed to protect people - being older and > being circumcised. > > "Acquisition of HIV did not occur in any of the circumcised men" Dr. > Thomas Quinn of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who led the > study, told the 7th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic > Infections, a meeting of AIDS researchers. > > "Age, independent of viral load, appeared to have a protective effect" > Quinn added. > > The highest transmission rate was in people 15 to 29 years old. > Quinn's team, working with 15.000 people in the Rakai district of > Uganda, also found that people did not pass on the virus to their > partners if they had a naturally low level of HIV in the blood - 1,500 > copies according to standard measures. He found that the more virus > people had in their blood, the more likely they were to pass it on. > There were no differences in women infecting men or men infecting > women. Quinn said his team was one of the first to actually go out and > test the idea where HIV is raging the worst. More than 23 million > people in sub-Saharan Africa are infected with HIV. The findings might > suggest ways of stemming the epidemic. Telling people to abstain from > sex or use condoms has not worked, and the drugs that keep the virus > at bay in some patients in rich countries are not available in the > poor countries hardest hit by the epidemic. > But the study suggests that using drugs to keep the virus at lower > levels, or a vaccine that might do the same without quite curing a > patient, might help. > > Quinn said he was at a loss to explain why circumcision might affect a > man's risk of being infected by a woman. He noted that in his team's > study, only Muslims were circumcised. He said there might be some > cultural differences in the timing or frequency of sex, or perhaps > being circumcised might go hand in hand with other practices that > would somehow protect a man from infection." > > End of article. > > Allah knows best. In the Qur'an is Healing. Those who follow the > Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet Pbuh have nothing to fear nor > shall they grieve. > Salaams, Rehana > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------