Journal Article

2015-05-28

Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes

University of Cape Town

Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have shown that medical male circumcision (MC) substantially reduces the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission.1 Driven by this evidence base, a growing number of countries have adopted large-scale MC campaigns in an effort to prevent heterosexually acquired HIV in men. In South Africa, for example, >130,000 medical male circumcisions were performed during 2010.2Encouraging adoption of MC will require educating millions of men and women about its protective benefits. The success of these policies will depend critically on what people infer from prevention information and the actions they take as a result.

The authors would like to thank ikapadata for access to their opinion and belief poll data and Jan Schenk and Amrik Cooper for their patience and assistance in clarifying aspects of respondent selection and data capture. The authors also thank 3 anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of their article. The authors state that all errors are their own. Brendan Maughan-Brown is grateful for funding from the NRF Research Chair in Poverty and Inequality Research and the University Research Committee at the University of Cape Town for his Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.