What an awful article...this one, and the HIV one that everyone keeps citing. This one starts off with the statement from the director of the institute that created it, "male circumcision is a scientifically proven method for reducing a man's risk of acquiring HIV infection." No real scientist would ever make this claim--science does not prove anything.

It gets worse. The way they conducted the studies (in both cases) was to start off with a large group of men, circumcise half of them, and see who comes back with more infections. There's no way to do blinding here, since you're going to know whether or not you've been circumcised. For example, one confounding factor may simply be that circumcisions hurt--maybe the controlled group just had less sex. Unfortunately, they didn't give any evidence for a mechanism, which makes it somewhat difficult to believe it. (As an aside, the mechanism they suggest is that the foreskin helps the HPV cells enter the cells on the surface of the penis--which suggests that it could prevented by simply pulling the foreskin back for a while after sex).

Another odd part about the study--the Herpes/HPV study was done in Uganda, and the one on HIV was done in Kenya. Of course, applying the results of a study to a population different from the one used in the study is generally a problem, but it's even worse in this case, because this whole conversation started because we believed circumcision stops people from using condoms. Kenya and Uganda are both known for disliking condoms, and so the effects of circumcision reducing the use of condoms has been minimized.