Circumcision

When men with machetes and axes chased Paul Otieno from his home here, they wanted more than his belongings. They wanted to cut off his foreskin. "They were shouting, 'If we don't kill you, we'll cut your private parts,' " Otieno, a 25-year-old mechanic, said of the attack Sunday. "They were just shouting, 'Kill! Chop them all!' " In Kenya, circumcision is a rite of passage for male members of most tribes. The Luos, however, do not practice it.

Whether or not parents choose to circumcise their infant sons, there will always be a small group of men who want what they don't have. Dr. Christopher Saigal, an associate professor of urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, often sees uncircumcised men in his practice seeking circumcisions for medical reasons, including phimosis, recurring urinary tract infections and genital warts. Occasionally he also hears from men who regret having been circumcised.

For nearly all of Nada Mouallem's pregnancy, she and her husband, Tony, had a running argument. She wanted to have their son circumcised. He didn't. "Many days, I'd go off and research all the pros. He'd go and research all the cons. Then we'd get together at night and fight," she says. Arguments about circumcision often polarize today's parents. The procedure, dating to ancient Egypt, is -- in simple terms -- the removal of the foreskin, the piece of skin that surrounds the tip of the penis.

" 'Til Death" "Circumdecision" episode, Fox, Oct. 8 The premise: Kenny Westchester (J.B. Smoove) loses his swim trunks at a water park, and his new girlfriend, Angie, seems concerned that he is uncircumcised. "It doesn't quite work for her," Kenny says. As Kenny approaches his third date with Angie believing they may be about to have sex, he considers circumcision.

When Oureye Sall walked through her village in years past, young girls would flee in silent panic at the sight of her face. She was the cutter. She inherited the trade from her mother and made a tidy profit: a dollar per operation for the practice known locally as "cleaning," and in much of the rest of the world as female genital circumcision, or mutilation. Sall broke each razor blade in two for economy's sake and used each half until it was too blunt to cut properly.

The World Health Organization recommended Wednesday that circumcision immediately become part of the frontline strategy to combat AIDS -- a move that the group said could save millions of lives. The benefit would be greatest in countries with widespread epidemics and low rates of circumcision, such as those in southern and eastern Africa, the WHO said. "The recommendations represent a significant step forward in HIV prevention," said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the WHO's HIV/AIDS Department.

In the delicate realm where the Koran meets human desire, Heba Kotb, a Muslim sex therapist in a ruffled gold head scarf, has strong opinions on vibrators, foreplay, premature you-know-what and why more men can't seem to locate the G-spot. An hour in her clinic, where some women wear black \o7abayas\f7 that reveal only their eyes, is a liberating venture into a culture that has traditionally relegated talk of sex to a family whisper.

THE movie begins with the butchering of a goat. A somber little girl named Sahira watches with curiosity as a group of adult men at a Southern California farm hold down the frightened animal and slice open its neck. When we next meet Sahira, she is 23, vivacious, confident, living at home with her close-knit Muslim family in a quiet Riverside suburb.

Circumcising men routinely across Africa could prevent millions of deaths from AIDS, World Health Organization researchers and colleagues reported this week in the journal Public Library of Science Medicine. They analyzed data from trials that showed men who had been circumcised had a significantly lower risk of infection with the AIDS virus and calculated that if all men were circumcised over the next 10 years, about 2 million infections and 300,000 deaths could be avoided.

Circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection by half, according to a new study conducted among nearly 8,000 adult males in Kenya and Uganda, researchers reported Wednesday. Circumcision proved so effective that the study was halted a year early and the procedure was offered to all study participants. Previous research has suggested that circumcision is beneficial, but the new trial is "definitive," according to Dr. Anthony S.