Last week, we carried a rather disturbing report where medical experts from the United Kingdom, United States, Cameroon, South Africa and Zimbabwe questioned the veracity of a World Health Organisation (WHO)-led campaign to circumcise millions of African boys and men as an effective means to reduce HIV transmission.
Published in the Developing World Bioethics, the study examined the history and politics of these circumcision campaigns in the context of race and colonialism, and found that they were hastily adopted without sufficient contextual research.

Without robust scientific evidence, WHO and UNAids in 2007 recommended voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) as critical, claiming that it could reduce the risk of sexual transmission of HIV from females to males by 60%.
However, it’s now emerging that the decision to implement the circumcision campaign in southern and eastern Africa was not based on robust scientific evidence, but just assumed that the results from clinical trials would safely “scale” to the real world without thinking through the cultural implications.
It also emerged that Africans were underrepresented in the decision-making process and the continent was deliberately targeted for the experiment just because we have a gullible leadership which believes anything Western is well-intended.