Two years ago, after three African studies showed that being circumcised could give men a 60 percent lower risk of getting the AIDS virus, the World Health Organization recommended male circumcision to prevent AIDS.
Since then, as different poor countries struggled to create national circumcision policies, much misinformation has circulated. There was also a dangerous surge in complications as traditional healers without sterile instruments began offering cheap circumcisions.
So last week the W.H.O., in conjunction with the United Nations AIDS program, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, Family Health International and several American and British schools of public health, created a Web site, malecircumcision.org.
It gathers scientific studies, policy documents and news articles and is meant to help fight popular myths, like the new one that circumcision is 100 percent protective so men can stop using condoms, said Dr. Kim Eva Dickson, a W.H.O. medical officer who oversaw the site’s creation.
The site also has a handbook demonstrating surgical techniques. It is not for training traditional healers or even surgeons, Dr. Dickson said, since that is ideally done only by one surgeon to another. But it could help, for example, at small missionary hospitals in rural areas, demonstrating new methods they could investigate and teaching that men need not just surgery but pain management, sex advice and condoms.
In its first week, she said, visits to the site came from the United States, Switzerland and Britain but also from, in descending order, Kenya, South Africa, Turkey, Namibia and India.
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