Researchers at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine suggests that male circumcision could protect women from HIV based on a large-scale study conducted in Uganda.

They studied 300 Ugandan couples in which the man had HIV but the woman did not, and found women's risk of infection was 30 per cent lower if her partner was circumcised.

The team presented its findings on February 8 at the 2006 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver, United States.

The team headed by Thomas Quinn, said that they will still wait for results from on-going trials in Kenya and Uganda before saying conclusively whether male circumcision limits HIV transmission from women to men only, or, as the new data suggest, from men to women also. The findings could lead them to recommend that all men be circumcised.