Michael Stalker, deputy director of the Male Circumcision Consortium, is encouraged. "Without this effort," he says, "you would have an estimated 15,000 more people with HIV in this one province in Kenya."
The consortium was formed after randomized controlled trials in Kenya, Uganda and South Africa revealed that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by 60 percent. With an $18.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the consortium is mounting a "full-court press" to train clinical officers and nurses to supplement the supply of doctors now performing circumcisions in the western Kenyan province of Nyanza on the shores of Lake Victoria.
Michael Stalker
Male patients are circumcised at a clinic in Kenya.
Dr. Wycliffe Omondi, who performs about two dozen circumcisions a day there, personally reflects the delicate ethnic and cultural issues surrounding male circumcision. The program's prime target is the Luo tribe, which traditionally does not circumcise and which has an HIV rate roughly double the national average. Omondi, who is Luo, was voluntarily circumcised while in college. The Kikuyu, Kenya's most populous tribe, circumcises its teenage boys during the traditional rite of passage to manhood.
The bloody violence that swept Kenya after the disputed 2007 election brought this cultural divide into stark view, with Luo and Kikuyu trading vicious insults about who was civilized and who was not, as the country plunged into violence.
"Now that (the circumcision program) has become public, men are coming openly," Omondi said in a published report, noting that he has circumcised males ranging in age from 8 to 85. "They are coming in large numbers."
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