My intention is to save lives, says woman behind male cut

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At around the same time, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the US for a doctor of philosophy programme in food and nutrition.

She did not want to abandon pursuing the link between circumcision and HIV so she enrolled for a masters in public health to run concurrently with her PhD programme and began to research on male circumcision for the MPH.

“I looked at maps of HIV prevalence against those showing the distribution of male circumcision in Africa,” says Dr Agot. She noticed that in areas where circumcision was popular, there were fewer incidents of HIV/Aids.

And so, a hypothesis that would later inform the male circumcision research in Kisumu was born.

In 2002, she coordinated a team that consisted of world-renowned professionals such as Prof Robert Bailey from the University of Manitoba in Canada and Prof Ndinya Acholla, and they worked tirelessly to come up with findings that were later approved by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAids in 2006.

WHO went ahead to describe male circumcision, based on the Kisumu study findings, alongside similar studies done in South Africa and Uganda, as “compelling and efficacious” in reducing chances of new HIV infections by up to 60 per cent.

Reasonable evidence

“The research showed reasonable evidence that circumcised males and their female partners, apart from reducing their chances of contracting the Aids virus, were also better placed to fight off certain venereal diseases,” explains Dr Agot.

But despite the positive findings, she expects male circumcision to take a while to gain total acceptance. “I knew that translating the findings into actual service provision would require tolerance rather than a know-it-all approach.”

What keeps her going despite several obstacles, she says, is the desire to see HIV rates going down to below three per cent and even lower in Nyanza, which has been ravaged by the scourge.

“I don’t see why communities in Nyanza should bear the biggest burden of HIV on a geographical basis.” In the short term, Dr Agot envisages providing male circumcision services mainly to high-risk men who are sexually active.

In the long term, the programme should be able to reach young men before they become sexually active and infants.