Doctors Perform the First Successful Penis Transplant

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-13/penis-transplant-a-world-first-south-african-surgeons-say

by avinassh • 11 years ago

38 20 11 years ago

bloomberg.com

dang• 11 years ago

Url changed from http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/13/8208183/penis-transplant-s..., which points to this.

Submitters: HN prefers original sources. Everyone will appreciate it if you track these down before posting.

avinassh• 11 years ago

I did not know about that and I will do bit of homework next time. Thanks for fixing the link!

curiouslurker• 11 years ago

By the way this is a serious problem, highlighted on the page below. BE WARNED: VERY GRAPHIC IMAGES:

http://ulwaluko.co.za/Photos.html

It is good to celebrate cultural traditions but not at this cost!

Fiahil• 11 years ago

This is, indeed, a serious problem.

I concur on the warning: this is graphic.

nate_meurer• 11 years ago

Agreed, but FUCK cultural traditions that involve initiation by torture. That's all this is.

reubenmorais• 11 years ago

Circumcision reduces a man’s risk of contracting HIV by 60 percent, Skorochod said in an interview.

I was surprised by this, so I looked it up: http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/malecircumcision/en/

There is compelling evidence that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by approximately 60%. Three randomized controlled trials have shown that male circumcision provided by well trained health professionals in properly equipped settings is safe. WHO/UNAIDS recommendations emphasize that male circumcision should be considered an efficacious intervention for HIV prevention in countries and regions with heterosexual epidemics, high HIV and low male circumcision prevalence.

The CDC reaches a similar conclusion: circumcision lowers the risk of HIV acquisition by heterosexual men, but doesn't change male-to-female transmission of HIV, and studies have found no statistically significant protective association for male-to-male transmission.

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/pdf/prevention_research_malecircumcis...

XorNot2• 11 years ago

The other problem is that the predictor for HIV is risky sexual behavior. Circumcision is not correlated with reduced risky behavior.

mattzito2• 11 years ago

Isn't that the point? People will have risky sexual behavior whether circumcised or not, so if circumcision reduces the likelihood of AIDS transmission in people with risky sexual behavior, it's a net win.

EDIT: the downthread comment clarified the parent comment for me.

As I said even further downstream, if the study was done naively, where we simply took circumcised vs. uncircumcised people and compared their HIV rates, I would agree 100%.

But the original study was taking a population of adult uncircumcised males in africa and circumcising 50% of them randomly, and then tracking their HIV infection rates. That should control for upbringing. From the studies:

"In these studies, men who had been randomly assigned to the circumcision group had a 60% (South Africa), 53% (Kenya), and 51% (Uganda) lower incidence of HIV infection compared with men assigned to the wait-list group to be circumcised at the end of the study. In all three studies, a small number of men who had been assigned to be circumcised did not undergo the procedure; likewise, a small number of men assigned to the control groups did undergo circumcision. When the data were reanalyzed to account for these occurrences, men who had been circumcised had a 76% (South Africa), 60% (Kenya), and 55% (Uganda) reduction in risk for HIV infection compared with those who were not circumcised."

Retra2• 11 years ago

Dying young reduces the risk of getting cancer, but surely it is not the recommended method for cancer prevention.

benaiah• 11 years ago

That's ridiculous. The problem with circumcision isn't that it's always a bad idea, it's that it's often done involuntarily and unsafely. There's nothing wrong with voluntary, safe circumcision for the purposes of lowering HIV transmission, or with public health campaigns that advocate it, as long as they don't misinform.

wQb4d3jhz• 11 years ago

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As Boyle and Hill point out, the men who were circumcised got additional counseling about safe sex practices compared to the control group, and then they had to refrain from having sex altogether for the simple reason that their lacerated penises had to be wrapped in bandages until their wounds healed — leading to what Boyle and Hill refer to as “time-out discrepancy” in the quote above. By contrast, the non-circumcised men got to keep having sex during the full two month period during which the treatment group was in recovery mode. Then (due to a statistically significant effect having been detected) the trials were stopped early — which tends to lead to an overestimation the true effect size of the treatment.

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/05/when-bad-scienc...

batrat• 11 years ago

Circumcision is done very early(between 2-6). If you are doing after, is either because some medical problem or you are moving to Islamism.

sheensleeves• 11 years ago

I know reddit / slashdot style jokes are unwelcome here, but I can't resist. The line of billionaires forms here -->

junto• 11 years ago

Serious question that the article doesn't appear to cover, but where did the transplanted penis come from? Was it a recently deceased donor?

thefreeman• 11 years ago

It was covered. They said that part of the initial problem was convincing family members of deceased organ donors to allow them to use the penis.

They were finally able to convince a family by agreeing to construct an artificial penis from left over skin for the deceased donor.

Doctors Perform the First Successful Penis Transplant

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