Vasectomy fails to excite men in district

KOCHI: The state has been coming up with aggressive campaigns on family planning and birth control for decades. Yet, men in Ernakulam district seem to have reservations about getting themselves sterilised. As per the latest figures from the Family Welfare programme, men contribute less than three percent of the total sterilisations that had taken place.From April 2011 to March 2012, as many as 10,488 people had undergone sterilisation in the district; of which only 300 are men. The rest of the sterilisations, including post-portem sterilisation, laparoscopic sterilisation and minilap, are all done on women. This is in spite of the fact that the advanced form of sterilisation for men, Non-Scalpel Vasectomy (NSV), is now available free of cost under the family welfare programme. In NSV, the person does not have to undergo surgery and the whole process would get over in an hour or so.However, in the case of women most of the sterilisation techniques are time-consuming and all of them involve surgeries and extended resting period.“We have been trying to promote the use of NSV since it is a very advanced type of vasectomy and is not time-consuming. An experienced doctor can in fact finish the whole process in just about half-an-hour and does not need any scalpel operations. But men are still reluctant to perform the NSV,” said Deputy DMO Dr Safiya Beevi KA. In some cases the women are reluctant to get their husbands sterilised, she said.Meanwhile, among women the most popular form of sterilisation seems to be post portem sterilisation (PPS) carried after delivery with 86 percent falling under the category.