Prevention of Kidney Infections
The bacteria that cause kidney infections, mainly fecal bacteria called fimbriated E. coli, bind to the moist inner surface of the foreskin and ascend up the urinary tract to cause kidney infections. Although urinary tract infections (UTIs) have been found to be more common in uncircumcised males of all ages, they are most prevalent and dangerous in infant boys below the age of 1 year, when they are more likely to lead to kidney damage. Since the mid-1980s, when the link between infant UTIs and circumcision was first discovered, more than 12 separate research studies have found that uncircumcised males are on average 10 times (1000%) more likely to get severe, potentially dangerous UTIs within the first of life as are circumcised infants.
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As a (female) child, I suffered from UTI's leading to a painful kidney infection that took years of treatment to cure. It was certainly no picnic, but not one doctor reccomended cutting off my labia. Why is it that cutting off a boy's foreskin is considerd a viable option to prevent UTI's but cutting off a girl's labia is not? Because on option is (wrongly) culturally accepted and the other (correctly) is not.
The studies that claim to show that circumcision prevent UTI are hopelessly flawed and prove nothing. None control for the very important confounding factor of breastfeeding. No medical society, therefore, recommends circumcision to prevent urinary tract infections (UTIs). The American Academy of Pediatrics does recommend breastfeeding of infants to reduce all kinds of infections, including UTI. Breastfeeding provides long-lasting protection against UTI, even after the infant has been weaned.
Breastfeeding works for both boys and girls. The risks of circumcision have been shown to exceed the risks of UTI, so circumcision is contra-indicated.
http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/pediatrics ;115/2/496
http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/UTI/hanson1 /
http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/UTI/chessare /
Dr. Schoen was on the AAP Task Force on Circumcision from 1987-1989 (look at his bio).
He is firmly stuck in that time era, despite his successors changing the stance he helped promote.
"The 1999 AAP Task Force on Circumcision abandoned the previous stance of the 1989 Task Force on Circumcision that circumcision may provide protection against UTI. The 1999 Task Force found that the bulk of the UTI studies were so methodologically flawed—by failing to control for confounding factors such as breastfeeding—that no meaningful conclusions could be drawn from them." http://www.cirp.org/library/disease/UTI /
Dr. Schoen is a broken record totally out of step the medical consensus. I doubt any data could change his bias against normal male genitals.