Operation Abraham- Reducing AIDS in Africa

You must remember this, a bris is just a bris....Usually I start the day with a real cutting story, and today is no different.

Editors note :YES this is going to be filled with childish puns, despite that, it IS a worthwhile story)

This is the kind of Israel story that you DON'T get to read about, Doctor's from Hadassah hospital going to Swaziland to train other doctors how to perform adult circumcision. Not as a religious rite, but as a way of stemming the AIDS epidemic in Africa (see video below)

A link between circumcision and AIDS prevention was shown in three studies conducted between 2004 and 2006 in South Africa, Uganda and Kenya, which found that the risk of contracting AIDS in heterosexual sex is 50 percent to 60 percent less among men who are circumcised.

The findings led the World Health Organization last year to recommend circumcision as an additional method for prevention of AIDS. WHO's recommendations were endorsed at a gathering of African health ministers.

So the WHO needed to find experts at circumcision on ADULTS (for one thing I would imagine they needed bigger tools). So if you are looking for doctors with a foresight for Adult foreskins where do you go? Israel of course.

In the heyday of Russian Immigration to Israel in the 1990s, about 1,000 adult male circumcisions a month were performed on newcomers in hospitals and clinics, in accordance with Jewish law.

"Israel is the only country with such experience in mass adult-male circumcision, and it can respond to a very important humanitarian challenge," said Schenker, director of Operation Abraham, a project launched last year that dispatched Israeli surgeons to teach circumcision in Africa.

Jewish circumcision ordinarily is performed on newborns [8 days old] , but many of the immigrants hadn't been circumcised in their countries of origin for various reasons, such as estrangement from Judaism, restrictions on religious rites in the Soviet era and pressure to assimilate in gentile society.

As the Russian immigrants flooded into Israel—about 1 million since 1989—the demand for adult circumcisions surged, and the country became a world leader in the field, with more than 80,000 procedures performed, according to various estimates.

Circumcision is a very delicate operation even on newborns (I when I was 8 days old, afterwards I started sucking my thumb and I couldn't walk for 14 months).

With the support of the Hadassah Medical Organization, which runs Israel's main university hospital in Jerusalem and has provided most of the budget and equipment, the Jerusalem AIDS Project sent three delegations of surgeons to teach adult circumcision in Swaziland. The southern African nation has the highest prevalence of AIDS in the world — 26 percent in a population of about 1 million.

"This is part of Hadassah's mission: outreach to other places," said Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director general of the organization.

The Israeli surgeons visited Swaziland twice last year and again in February, training 10 local doctors in adult male circumcision and two others in the procedure on newborns. The Israeli teams included an Israeli Arab doctor with experience in Muslim ritual circumcision.

Prudence Mkhatshwa, chief nurse in male circumcision at the Family Life Association of Swaziland, a non-governmental group that partnered with the Israelis, said the training had helped to significantly raise the weekly rate of adult circumcisions and that the public response is growing. The procedure, conducted under local anesthesia, was first offered in Swaziland in 2006.

"Before, people were scared, but now they see the benefits and they are more willing to do it," Mkhatshwa said from Mbabane, the Swazi capital. She said street billboards are promoting circumcision, in addition to condom use and abstention from casual sex, as methods of preventing AIDS.

Dr. Eitan Gross, a pediatric surgeon from Hadassah who served as the project's medical director, said that working with the Swazi doctors and nurses was a "moving experience." "You had a sense that you were doing something groundbreaking, and they were very grateful," Gross said.

As a nation Israel takes its obligation to be a "shining light upon the world" very seriously. It not the sort of thing that you traditionally read in the Mainstream Media, whose liberal agenda cause creates an editorial skew which tries to demonize the Jewish State. The fact is, when the world has a problem, Israel's first reaction is always the same. "Heneini, " a Hebrew word meaning HERE I AM.
(If you can't see video below click here)

Source: Israeli expertise in ritual helps Africa combat AIDS Docs trained in adult male circumcisions By Joel Greenberg