FOR YEARS, Ron Low took pride in his ability to give his wife multiple orgasms in a single sexual encounter. This was possible, in part, because his erections lasted up to an hour. By the age of 38, though, he found himself wishing he could climax sooner. After one particularly unsatisfying night with his wife, he turned to the internet, where he soon found information that persuaded him that his troubles had a clear explanation: His penis was circumcised.

"I was missing the capability to experience the sexual sensations to the fullness that nature has seemingly designed us for," Low recently told Undark in an email. In the early days of his research, he found material suggesting that circumcision affects penile sensitivity and sex. Then he discovered forums where circumcised men were discussing techniques for regrowing the foreskin.

Soon, Low was taking steps to reverse the surgery that had been performed on him as an infant — too young, he pointed out, to give informed consent.

Some men, meanwhile, have had a different journey. Lee Caddick was not circumcised as a child. He decided to get the procedure at age 48, after decades of suffering from a too-tight foreskin that made erections and sex both painful and embarrassing. Growing up in England, there had been few opportunities to talk earnestly about penises and sexual function. "I wish I had got it done earlier," he said. "It might have made a big difference in my life."

Male circumcision is one of the world's oldest surgeries and remains one of the most common procedures today. It involves the removal of all or part of the foreskin, known as the prepuce, and can be carried out at any age for religious, medical, or other reasons. Rates of the procedure vary widely by country: from 71 percent of males in the United States to 21 percent in the United Kingdom, from 92 percent in Israel to less than 1 percent in Ireland, according to a 2016 estimate.

Some religions practice infant circumcision, but in the U.S., religious reasons account for just a tiny percentage of all newborns who get circumcised. Most parents arrange for their child to have the procedure for medical reasons. The American Academy of Pediatrics, or AAP, currently states that families should be given access to the surgery, on the grounds that it may reduce the risk of acquiring certain infections. Complications are infrequent and generally minor, according to the AAP, particularly when the procedure is performed on newborns.

Yet the AAP did not issue a blanket recommendation, stating that the procedure's "health benefits are not great enough" to warrant one. In fact, claims that circumcision improves health are increasingly the subject of heated, and occasionally acrimonious, debate. When Andrew Freedman, a California-based pediatric urologist, agreed to contribute to the AAP's policy statement, a friend who had worked on the previous task force warned him against it. The topic was too fraught.

"He said, 'Don't do it. You'll get death threats.'"

The friend was not far off, Freedman said. After the policy statement was released, angry messages flooded his inbox: "Twenty thousand people sent me emails suggesting I get cancer and die," he recalled.

That anger stemmed in part from the fact that circumcision's medical benefits are not clear-cut. And for many men, being circumcised — or, for that matter, being uncircumcised — is not merely a question of medicine, but one of aesthetics, consent, bodily autonomy, and sexual pleasure.

"There's a lot of mythology around it," said Caddick, referring to circumcision's influence on sex. "You know, there are people who say their orgasms are more intense, which I think could be true. And there are other people who say you lose like 90 percent of your sensitivity." Scholarly research, it turns out, supports Caddick's impression that men's experiences with circumcision and sexual function vary widely.

"I think everybody's experience is different," he said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, politicians, scientists and media organizations vilified unvaccinated people, blaming them for prolonging the pandemic and advocating policies that barred "the unvaccinated" from public venues, businesses and their own workplaces.

But a peer-reviewed study published last week in Cureus shows that a key April 2022 study by Fisman et al. — used to justify draconian policies segregating the unvaccinated — was based on the application of flawed mathematical risk models that offer no scientific backing for such policies.

Dr. David Fisman, a University of Toronto epidemiologist was the lead author of the April 2022 study, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), which the authors said showed that unvaccinated people posed a disproportionate risk to vaccinated people.

Since vaccines were first invented, governments and the medical profession have had a compulsive need to defend the products, regardless of how much they hurt people, how much they fail to work, or how unnecessary they are (e.g. because the disease in question is unlikely to ever harm people or a safe and effective treatment for it already exists).

My best guess to explain this phenomenon is that the vaccination meme is extremely appealing to the ruling class because it provides a simple solution (injecting everyone) for a complex problem (ensuring the health of the nation), and is relatively easy to implement since all it requires is a leader doubling down using the force of the state against anyone who does not comply (which leaders often default to doing for a variety of problems).

Unfortunately, since life is not that simple, this approach always falls short and requires leaders and governments who commit to it to then cut a lot of corners as problems inevitably arise. As a result, some of the recurring themes you see in the forgotten vaccine disasters include:

Scientists have warned that a virus dubbed 'Zombie deer disease' could potentially spread to humans after the first-ever case was detected in Yellowstone National Park last month.

The fatal brain virus, which leaves animals confused, drooling, and unafraid of humans may someday infect people, as cautioned by some authorities.

The alarm was raised after a deer carcass tested positive for chronic wasting disease (CWD) in Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming in November.

Haifa University reports 60% of Israelis who weren't directly affected by Hamas war develop severe acute stress disorder and even PTSD...

Seventy-three days have passed since Hamas' attack and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, and the sights and stories continue to haunt everyone in Israel. The scope of the tragedy and the number of victims has led to a significant increase in distress and mental health disorders, which the victims and their families are grappling with, but it does not just affect them. A new study from the University of Haifa indicates a large number of Israelis have been impacted mentally by the war even if they weren't harmed by it directly.

According to the study's findings, about 60% of Israelis who aren't in the first two circles of those directly affected by the war have developed severe acute stress disorder (ASD), which poses a risk for the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

These are individuals who aren't residents of communities close to the Gaza border or other towns physically affected by the war, or who have had their property damaged. They also don't have family members who were harmed, killed or abducted since the war began.

Dr. Svetlana Baziliansky, the study's lead author, explains:

"The high percentage of those suffering from ASD as a result of the current war is higher than any other events and wars that took place in Israel's history."

A Flourish chart

There have been dramatic spikes in gonorrhoea and syphilis cases in Australia in the past decade, according to research from a leading STI surveillance group.

In reports released today, the Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney reports a two-fold increase in gonorrhoea cases and a tripling in syphilis numbers since 2013.

Chlamydia has also risen by 12% at the same time, though Kirby researchers say the disease - which is often symptomless - is likely underreported.

The much-ridiculed "antivax trope" proved to be true

Summary: a study of humans suffering from Long Covid analyzed their cellular DNA. The authors unexpectedly found genes uniquely specific to the Pfizer COVID vaccine in human blood cells. This finding proves that mRNA COVID vaccines permanently integrate into the DNA of some COVID-vaccinated people.

A newly published study analyzed human DNA isolated from volunteers' blood samples. Authors looked for matches between blood cells's DNA and genetic sequences unique to the Pfizer COVID vaccine BNT162b2. After using sensitive tests, scientists found genes that could only come from the Pfizer COVID vaccine in the genomes of blood samples analyzed.

A newly-uncovered trove of documents detailing plans to create a Covid-like virus in China months before the pandemic make the 'lab leak almost certain', experts say.

The records - obtained now by FOIA requests - lay out a plan to 'engineer spike proteins' to infect human cells that would then be 'inserted into SARS-Covid backbones' at the infamous Wuhan virology lab from December 2018. Just a year later, in late 2019, the Covid-19 virus emerged with a uniquely adept ability to infect humans, going on to cause a global pandemic.

The proposal was made by the now-notorious EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit that channels US government grants abroad to fund these types of experiments. Ultimately, the application was denied by the US Department of Defense, but critics say the plans laid out in the proposal serve as a 'blueprint' for how to create Covid.

Recent testing revealed 92 unknown molecules — and a fungicide — in "synthetic" milk now sold in common grocery chains, according to the Health Research Institute (HRI).

The product, sold by Bored Cow, uses a fake whey protein called "ProFerm" made by biotech company and partner Perfect Day. Perfect Day uses genetically modified "microflora" to produce the synthetic milk protein.

According to Bored Cow, their product is a new kind of "animal-free" milk alternative "made with real milk protein from fermentation."

At least three people have died from Rocky Mountain spotted fever [RMSF] in the last five months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in a public alert on Friday.

Five cases of the deadly disease — caused by bites from infected ticks — have been reported since July in Southern California.

In each case, the patient had been in the Mexican border city of Tecate within two weeks of becoming ill, the agency said.

All five patients, three US residents and two Mexican residents, were hospitalized and three died. Four of the patients were minors.

"RMSF is a severe, rapidly progressive, and often deadly disease transmitted by the bite of infected ticks, although many patients do not recall being bitten by a tick," the CDC notice said.