New York men who are at a high risk of contracting HIV/AIDS are being encouraged by the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to undergo circumcision in the backdrop of the report released by the World Health Organization, which had said that the procedure is one of the effective ways of preventing the disease.
Stating that New York had the highest number of AIDS cases in the country, the city's health commissioner Thomas Frieden said, "New York City remains the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. In some subpopulations, you have 10 to 20 percent prevalence rates of HIV, just as they do in parts of Africa."
Frieden said that the health department has already started asking a number of community groups as well as gay rights organizations to talk about the issue. He added that Health and Hospitals Corporation has been asked to perform the surgery free of charge to individuals who do not have any medical insurance.
Last month WHO recommended countries to adopt circumcision as one of the measures in the fight against the disease. The report was released following the results of three separate clinical trials in Africa, which revealed that undergoing circumcision slowed down the risk of contracting AIDS by as much as 60 percent in heterosexual men.
