I criticize the science because their methods are flawed and they went looking for a certain result and stopped the study early when they got it.
I'll read the stupid study again, but it won't change anything. There should be other people who make sure scientists are actually doing science and not statistics.
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A total of 3,274 uncircumcised men, aged 18–24 y, were randomized to a control or an intervention group with follow-up visits at months 3, 12, and 21. Male circumcision was offered to the intervention group immediately after randomization and to the control group at the end of the follow-up.
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Why would they offer to circumcise the control group before they even started if they were impartial and trying to determine if circumcision had any effects or not. It sounds like they expected a result from the start to me.
And how much sex will a newly circumcised guy have in the three months following the surgery?
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The trial was stopped at the interim analysis (i.e. 12 months)
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So, they didn't want to give it another 9 months (which is still too short of a time in my opinion) to see the numbers get closer together...
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When considering only those participants who completed their M21 visit, the RR was 0.38 (38%)
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But it looks like they actually did collect the data. It's just that 60% after one year sounds better than 38% after 2 years. Is it going to be 20% after 3 years? It should hold true year after year if they want to make a claim.
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Of the five reported sexual behavioural factors, all were higher in the intervention group than in the control group during the period M4–M12, and four out of five were higher during the period M13–M21. Only the mean number of sexual contacts showed statistically significant differences during the period M4–M12
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I was a little mistaken above, they did collect behavior data in this study. Yet I'm still not convinced that one group didn't by chance happen to sleep with more HIV infected people.
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There were 20 HIV infections (incidence rate = 0.85 per 100 person-years) in the intervention group and 49 (2.1 per 100 person-years) in the control group
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So, do they know how many times each person in each group slept with an infected individual?
(Their graph says it is 7 vs 15 after 12 months. They need to check to make sure things correspond to one another. I also like how it is 2 vs 9 after 3 months (when the circumcised group wasn't supposed to or couldn't have sex for 6 weeks...) At the end they wrote it off as an insignificant amount of time during the 21 month trial, yet it's like starting a baseball game already down. It was only a 5 vs 6 infection rate for the next 9 months.)
And there are a bunch of other numbers thrown around like 72/74 were HIV positive at the beginning (how many others had recently contracted it, but the HIV test missed it), and there were uncircumcised men in the intervention group, and circumcised men in the control group at about a 8% level for some reason.
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According to an earlier study in the research site area, 59% (95% CI: 55%–63%) of uncircumcised men said that they would be circumcised if it reduced their chance of acquiring HIV and STDs
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Condoms are much better at preventing STDs. Fixing the 1.8% marriage rate would improve things. Producing a quick at home HIV/STD test would help things. They are spreading false beliefs that all they need to do is get circumcised and they can fuck anyone and stay disease free.