Michael Savage, upset by a Fox News headline on metzitzah b'peh (MBP), the direct mouth-to-bleeding-baby-penis sucking done by many haredi (and some Modern Orthodox) mohels after cutting off the baby's foreskin, dedicates more than an hour of his national radio show to attacking MBP.
Michael Savage, upset by a Fox News headline on metzitzah b'peh (MBP), the direct mouth-to-bleeding-baby-penis sucking done by many haredi (and some Modern Orthodox) mohels after cutting off the baby's foreskin, dedicates more than an hour of his national radio show to attacking MBP.
Unfortunately, the headline from Fox News and the story itself are incorrect.
Fox, based on a mistaken report in small Internet-only publication that covers medical news on a very rudimentary level, reported that two babies in the past three months got herpes (HSV-1) from MBP, which is true.
But it also reported that one of those babies also got HIV (AIDS) from MBP – which is false. The small Internet-only publication confused HSV-1 and HIV in the same way scribes used to occasionally drop lines or words from manuscripts or confuse similar sounding words – in other words, a typo. Neither baby got HIV (AIDS).
Over the past few days, several people sent me the Fox story (and others that made the same errors), asking me to post them. Each time, I explained that the article they had sent me was wrong.When one of the those readers challenged me, I told him that I had the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DoHMH) alert sent to doctors, and there was nothing there about HIV (AIDS).
When this mistaken story didn't die, I decided to call the DoHMH, which I did yesterday just before it closed.
There was no HIV (AIDS) found, and the DoHMH told me the story was being corrected, meaning Fox and that small publication and the other publications that believed the error was the truth will in some way issue a correction.
Here is Savage's hour on MBP: