The New York Daily News reports: "New York City health officials are investigating whether a baby boy died after contracting herpes from the rabbi who circumcised him, the Daily News has learned. The probe was launched after city officials realized that three infants in the city who tested positive for herpes last year all were circumcised by Rabbi Yitzchok Fischer. The Rockland County-based Fischer is a prominent mohel - someone who performs religious circumcisions.

"Under Jewish law, a mohel is supposed to draw blood from the circumcision wound to remove impurities. While many mohels do it by hand, Fischer uses a practice little known outside ultra-Orthodox communities called metzizah bi peh, in which the mohel uses his mouth. On Oct. 16, 2004, Fischer performed a bris, or religious circumcision, on twins. Ten days later, one infant died of herpes, and the other tested positive for the virus, according to papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court by city lawyers.
[...]
"The custom of metzizah is thousands of years old. But experts said that these days, many mohels breathe in through a sterile tube to draw the blood instead of using their mouths directly on the wound, although in some ultra-Orthodox sects, the oral practice is mandatory. The city asked Fischer to submit to a blood test in November, and ordered him to stop performing metzizah by mouth while waiting for the results, court papers show. Officials told him to use a sterile tube and gloves in the meantime. But the Health Department got a report that Fischer wasn't following the order, so the city filed the legal complaint to compel him do so."

Just because adult men have been sucking blood from the penis of infants after non-elective, unneccessary genital surgery for thousands of years doesn't make it right. That infants are dying and being infected with incurable diseases due to this practice is evidence that it is wrong. Oh, wait, it was done for religious reasons. That makes it okay. It would be discrimination, maybe even racist, to say that anything done in the name of religion was bad. And even if it was bad, it was just this one guy in this one place this one time that did the bad thing. Nothing like this has ever happened before and it certainly won't ever happen again. All the other Jews (and Christians and Hindu and Muslims and Buddhists) don't have any responsibility in failing to 'clean house' and get rid of monsterous practices like this; after all, who's to say what is right when it comes to the invisible monster that lives in the sky? Maybe it's part of G_d's beautiful yet mysterious plan that some infants should have their genitals mutilated, then sucked by grown men, then die from disease.