Hold the champagne - and the scalpels. My back-of the envelope calculation is that the latest Herpes study shows it would take about 40 circumcisions to prevent one transmission - and that's in Uganda where 38% of the men they started with had to be shut out because they had herpes already. The figure for HIV is similar. HPV is very common, readily spread non-sexually, and the immune system is good at getting rid of it.

A small handful of researchers is behind most of these studies, and they're very good at jumping from "We circumcised thousands of paid volunteers and after two years they had rather less X disease than the thousands we didn't" - with the help of uncritical media - to "Circumcision prevents X disease, therefore all males should be circumcised", but it isn't as simple as that.

Damage from circumcision is commoner than people think (a mother and her baby in Atlanta have just won $2.3million after half his glans was cut off), and the foreskin is the most sensitive part of the penis. Few intact men would give it up willingly.

The bottom line is human rights. If adults want to have parts cut off, they may, but doing it to babies is a strange anomaly today.

It has been reported that uncircumcised men can spread Bacterial Vaginosis , not sure if that is true.