Abstract

Welcome to this bumper Christmas issue of the JME. In this issue we have many interesting papers to tide you over the Christmas holiday and provide some intellectual stimulation if you run out of festive cheer and good will to all men. HIV/AIDS and circumcisionMale circumcision is a controversial subject and papers on the ethics of circumcision tend to generate quite a lot of traffic on the JME correspondence web-pages. Whether this will also be the case for the paper by Fox and Thomson in this issue is too early to tell. Fox and Thomson analyse the policy response to the 2009 Cochrane review that concluded that there was strong evidence that male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV acquisition in men having heterosexual sex. The paper argues that the move to develop public policy based on this review is premature. It adduces a number of reasons why this is the case. First, the Cochrane review itself called for more research. Second, there is a long history of …