Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro appeared to be devastated by the sad statistics that over 1,000 people have their penises amputated in the country annually, putting forward his concerns over the “ridiculous” data to reporters after he visited the Education Ministry the other day. He went on to address the root cause of the issue, arguing that surgeries of that kind occur as extreme medical measures due to “a lack of water and soap” and calling for finding “a way to get out of the bottom of this hole”.
Eduardo de Castro Ferreira, a member of the onco-urologic department specialising in studies of penis and testicular cancer in the Brazilian Urology Society, has commented to Sputnik that penis cancer is typical among uneducated men who have poor knowledge of what intimate hygiene boils down to. Also, phimosis and HPV (human papilloma virus) may also trigger the disease. The doctor agreed with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro that the best means to avoid this is making use of two simple solutions – namely water and soap.
“It [cancer] emerges on genitals as a sore, an ulcer. Men typically wait for half a year before turning to medics for help, to diagnose the problem and work out how to treat it”, Castro Ferreira noted, adding:
“If you take a bath three times a day and use a bar of soap at least one a day, one may give you guarantees that you won’t come down with penis cancer”.
Nevertheless, he stressed that one cannot say the same about prostate, breast, and cervical cancer, for instance, as in those cases, there are factors that don’t essentially depend on people, “unlike penis cancer, which is directly linked to a person himself”.
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“The ailment cripples. The treatment cripples. So it’s essential to inform people [about the disease] before it actually occurs”.
While Bolsonaro himself didn’t dwell upon the sources of the quoted statistical data when making his comments, a spokeswoman for the Brazilian Urology Society told Reuters that the figure is "based on official data for penis amputations".