Tuesday, 6 January 2009
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Tuesday, 6 January 2009 |
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| Eastern & Southern Africa Regional Consultation on Safe Male Circumcision and HIV Prevention held 7-9 May 2007 The Eastern & Southern Africa Regional Consultation on Safe Male Circumcision and HIV Prevention was held at the Rainbow towers, Harare, Zimbabwe on 7-9 May 2007. This meeting is the second recent intercountry meeting on this subject in southern Africa. The first such meeting in the region was the SADC health ministers' meeting of last month, which called on all members to 'take a policy position on the matter in line with the WHO report entitled: "New data on Male Circumcision and HIV Prevention: Policy and Programme Implications."' Male circumcision is currently on the rise in areas not previously circumcising, with some hospital surgeries having wait lists running into August. In Kisumu, among the traditionally noncircumcising Luo, rates of circumcision have tripled since The Lancet publication of their RCT results. The South African results have produced the same tonic effect on circumcisions in Swaziland. Demand is exceeding supply in many places. Some ESAR countries are heavily circumcised and require little further support for MC (most of Angola, Comoros, Eritrea, most of Ethiopia, Madagascar, Somalia). Some require advocacy to the proper level of government ( Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe). Burundi and Rwanda, uniquely, are low to medium seroprevalence and low to medium MC. They do not fit the priority criteria for external support to early MC scale-up, though this could become available if requested by the governments. Countries which have held national consultations on MC are deemed ready for early interagency tech support missions, preparatory to making large scale funding proposals for MC scale-up to the GFATM. UNICEF/ESARO would lend a member to those tech support missions, a specialist in communications/IEC issues. Most ESAR countries (with the exception of largely self-financed South Africa ) will be unable to do rapid MC scale-up with locally available resources. Even a small country like Swaziland would have to spend $3 million to circumcise 100,000 uncircumcised men. Mobile teams or an MC version of the "Cataract Camp" approach, where acceptable, are promising approaches to clearing the backlog of uncircumcised men who want MC. Some countries, including the US and Israel, might be willing to field teams of mobile surgeons to assist in catchup circumcisions, training national staff while performing circumcisions in the field. It is notable that all of the RCT countries ( Kenya, Uganda and South Africa) have yet to make a national policy position on male circumcision and were either absent from this meeting, or represented by junior staff. Zimbabwe recently held a two-day consultation on the role of MC in reproductive health and HIV prevention on 7-8 June 2007. The timeline for MC will vary by country. The high priority countries can expect early interagency tech support missions to assist in developing GFATM funding proposals in support of MC scale-up. R. Davis, UNICEF Useful references: http://www.who.int/hiv/topics/malecircumcision/en/index.html
Posted 8 June 2007 |
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