CIRCUMCISION UPTAKE AND ITS ASSOCIATED FACTORS AMONG MALE STUDENTS IN MAJANG ZONE HIGH SCHOOL, SOUTHWEST ETHIOPIA.

Background: Male circumcision is an invasive technique in which all or part of the foreskin, the fold of skin covering the head of the penis is removed by a surgical cut. Studies shows that circumcision reduced the risk of heterosexual HIV transmission from an infected woman to a circumcised. However, circumcision in Majang zone is still low. Hence, in addition to there is limited study in the area, this study assess the prevalence and associated factors of uncircumcised male students among high school students in Majang Zone. Methods: Facility based cross sectional study was employed. Initially, profile of all eligible students was taken from each school registrar/office. At the first stage, we included all high schools (totally 4 in number) in the study. Then using identification numbers of those eligible students were allocated the sample size proportionally to number of students at each high school. Structured and pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect data. Data was entered in to Epi data version 3.1 and analyzed by SPSS 20 after having encoded each data per respondent. Logistic regression analysis was employed to identify predictor variables. Odd ratio with 95% confidence interval was used to assess association of variables and P-value of ≤ 0.05 was considered as significant association. Result: A total of 382 men aged 15–35 years from the high school students from Majang zone, Gambella region of Ethiopia participated in the study. From the total participant of the study 73.3% of the respondent was circumcised. In multivariable except marital status and MC reduce the risk of HIV infection was significant. Male high school students who had age 15-29 (AOR = 0.047, 95 % CI: 3.628(1.016-12.950) were more likely to have uncircumcised male high school student as compared to age group of 30-39. Students who followed orthodox religion (AOR = 0.038, CI: 2.849(1.059–7.667) were three times leseless more likely to have uncircumcised male high school student as compared to those who followed Muslim. Those who were living in urban area (AOR = 0.033, 95 % CI: (1.045– 2.846) were more likely to have uncircumcised male high school student as compared to living in a rural area. Conclusion and recommendation: The findings indicate that a substantial proportion of High school male students were heard about Male circumcision though the prevalence is higher than that of the national and other regions data. This study revealed that respondent’s perception towards the threat of HIV/AIDS, knowledge about the importance of male circumcision and age were the major predictors of willing to uptake circumcision. Addressing these issues on adolescents at school or different institutional levels might be somewhat easier than shifting population-level norms around male circumcision.