In a two-year study, wives of circumcised men were 58% more likely to contract HIV than wives of intact men.

The study, presented at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, was carried out in Uganda and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It compared the annual HIV incidence in the wives of men who had been circumcised to wives of men who remained intact.

The study’s principal investigator, Maria Wawer of Johns Hopkins University, said the results were “unexpected and somewhat disappointing”.

Both groups reported the same level of condom use. Wawer said the results posed a challenge to the mass roll-out of male circumcision in Africa.

Wawer was a researcher on a 2007 Ugandan clinical study that concluded circumcsion lowered the rate of infection in men. Researchers had predicted that this “benefit” extended to women. Yet, this does not appear to be true. The circumcision clinical study done by Wawer, Ronald Gray, and others at Johns Hopkins was severley criticized by peers.

ICGI’s opinion of male circumcision as an HIV preventative is that it will cause more infections, not less, and that it will divert money that should be going into proven efforts such as free condoms, increasing nutrition, and purifying water supplies.