Jeffrey D. Klausner

Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, M.D., a medical doctor and professor of medicine, specializing in infectious disease.

Klausner is affiliated with the Division of Infectious Diseases and Program in Global Health, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of Californias Los Angeles, CA, USA. He is also affiliated with the Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention and Control Section, San Francisco Department of Public Health, CA, USA.

Publications

Klausner is a prolific writer with more than 800 publications. Some of these are written by circumfetishist Brian J. Morris who had no problems to convince Klausner for co-authoring them. Due to his development and his tasks, Klausner himself seemed to be firmly convinced that neonatal circumcision was effective against HIV/AIDS, without there being or being really evident evidence for this.

Circumfetish

In a phone interview with the Independent, Klausner said that, around 2007/08:

“	evidence became very clear that circumcision was a highly effective prevention intervention for HIV and the first priority was to get adolescents and young men circumcised. And, over time, we scaled up progress for newborns. – Jeffrey D. Klausner

After moving from South Africa to Los Angeles, Klausner started working in various countries. It was in Haiti in March 2012 that he connected with GHESKIO. He said it was one of the first NGOs to respond to the AIDs crisis in the early 1980s. Through GHESKIO, he was introduced to Haiti’s first lady, Sophia Martelly, in Washington, DC, at the International AIDs Conference. Klausner said that, when talking to Martelly about the prospect of introducing newborn circumcision to Haiti, she said, “Absolutely, we’d love to do that, but we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the technical expertise, so we really need to rely on people like you to help us.”

Klausner returned to GHESKIO and worked to organize “a physical place, the proper clean procedure room … certain types of equipment and supplies and autoclaves, sterilized surgical equipment, and the tab was running into tens of thousands, about $50,000…. Once we had the supplies and materials, then the next step was to get the training, and I’m not a surgeon. I contacted the head of circumcision programs in Kenya, a guy named Robert Bailey.”

Bailey directed Klausner to Pollock. Klausner said he was “encouraged by [Pollock’s] enthusiasm and … set up a training program for May 2014.”

Klausner offered three measures for the mission’s success:

“

"One is the actual conduct of safe, well-done circumcision on the babies that Dr. Pollock and his colleague Pierre Crouse did. That’s an achievement in itself: they did over 100 infants in two and a half days. The second part is that the surgeon and the teams that were trained, they continue to do it themselves, so they have done an additional 100 since we left. And then the third piece is that we have trained the trainers, and now other teams are being trained” to perform the surgery. – Jeffrey D. Klausner