Erratum to: Estimation of country-specific and global prevalence of male circumcision

Following publication of the original article in Population Health Metrics [1], the authors wish to alert the reader to the following errors in male circumcision (MC) prevalence for 6 of the 237 countries and territories in Table 1.

–United States: The value for MC prevalence in the United States (US) is shown as 70.1, which is from reference 27, but this value should have been 80.5, as reported in reference 26. The figure of 70.1 is for 222,546 privately insured US males aged 1–18 years, whereas the figure of 80.5 is for 6,294 US males aged 14–59 years drawn from National Health and Nutrition Surveys by researchers at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The 80.5 figure is more representative of the overall male population in the US. As stated in the Methods section, circumcision prevalence figures for mature males across this general age range were used for all countries and territories when available. Only for Canada (infants) and Taiwan (boys aged 7–13 years) were the surveys that were available not for mature males.

–Germany: MC prevalence in Table 1 is shown as 10.9 %, but should have been 6.7 %. The former came from a nationwide survey of 8,985 males aged 1–17 (reference 82), whereas the latter is from a survey of 2,490 mature males aged 30–61 (Reference 83).

–Thailand: 11.9 % rather than 23.4 %, which arose from a calculation error.

–Australia: 85 % for males aged 16–64 (reference 36) rather than 26.6 %, which was the weighted average of these older males together with figures of 11 % for males aged 0–6 months (reference 37) and 10.9 % for newborn males (reference 38).

–Zambia: 21.6 % from 2014 data (reference 160) rather than 12.8 % from 2007 data (reference 161).

–Pitcairn Island: 0.1 % rather than 0 % owing to our decision to make 0.1 % the minimum for any country because MC is used commonly to treat foreskin-related medical conditions.

Use of these corrected figures led to estimates of 1,425,692,596 for total number of circumcised males globally based on 2015 CIA data for total males and 907,738,816 based on United Nations and CIA data. MC prevalence was calculated as 39.0 % (95 % CI: 33.7, 44.3) and 37.1 % (95 % CI: 31.8, 42.4), using 2015 CIA data for sex ratio and total population in 237 countries and territories globally and on 2015 United Nations figures for males aged 15–64 years, respectively.

The use of the corrected figures does not alter our rounded estimate for global MC prevalence of 37–39 %.

The corrected Table 1 appears below. Additional files 1, 2 and 3 referred to below are available for this article on-line.