MONDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Children born in families covered by Medicaid may be at higher risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections because there are lower rates of male circumcision among Medicaid recipients, according to a report published in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Arleen A. Leibowitz, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles, analyzed data on 417,282 newborn baby boys from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample, and used it to calculate the hospital-level circumcisions rates.

The mean rate of male circumcision was 55.9 percent, but in states where Medicaid covers the cost of the procedure, the rate of male circumcision was 24 percent higher than it was in states where it is not covered by Medicaid, the researchers found. In hospitals with a higher proportion of Hispanic patients, circumcision rates were lower, the report indicates.

"In the wake of the 1999 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) statement on male circumcision, which adopted a neutral stance, many states opted to remove the procedure from Medicaid coverage," the authors write. "In deciding whether to recommend routine neonatal male circumcision, we believe that the AAP should weigh the impact of their recommendation on the long-term health of both male and female children and the potentially disparate effects of their decisions on poor children."

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