But the different perceptions did not translate into different behaviour, sex-wise.
“Countries that have been holding back on implementing medical circumcision programs due to a lack of evidence regarding risk compensation should have no concerns about scaling-up programs,” said lead scientist Nelli Westercamp in a press release issued by the university.
The research appears online in a specialist journal, AIDS and Behavior.
– Food voucher incentive –
Separately, a presentation at the Melbourne conference said that offering men compensation in the form of food vouchers worth around $9 or $15 (6.5 or 11 euros) was a useful incentive for the circumcision campaign.
The WHO and UNAIDS recommend voluntary circumcision in 14 countries in eastern and southern Africa where HIV is highly prevalent.
But most countries remain far short of reaching their targeted numbers – and investigators have found that many men are deterred by the loss of wages from time off work to have the operation, and the cost of travelling to and from the clinic to have it carried out.
Harsha Thirumurthy of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill led a team who studied 1,504 uncircumcised men in Nyanza aged 25-49 who were randomly assigned to groups where they were offered food vouchers of varying amounts to offset the cost of the operation or offered no compensation at all.
Nine percent who were offered the equivalent of $15 decided to get circumcised within the next two months, while 6.6 percent did so if offered $8.75.
Among those offered $2.50, the takeup was only 1.9 percent.
In the “control” group, where no compensation was offered, just 1.6 per cent got circumcised within the following two months.
The increase was “modest” overall but much higher among married and older men, a group that had been harder to persuade, according to the scientists.
“The interventions also significantly increased the likelihood of circumcision uptake among participants at higher risk of acquiring HIV. This latter result is especially promising from an HIV prevention standpoint,” according to the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
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