More than 3 million teenaged girls have at least one sexually transmitted disease (STD), a new government study suggests.
The most severely affected are African-American teens. In fact, 48 percent of African-American teenaged girls have an STD, compared with 20 percent of white teenaged girls.
“What we found is alarming,” Dr. Sara Forhan, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a teleconference Tuesday. “One in four female adolescents in the U.S. has at least one of the four most common STDs that affects women.”
“These numbers translate into 3.2 million young women nationwide who are infected with an STD,” Forhan said. “This means that far too many young women are at risk of the serious health effects of untreated STDs, including infertility and cervical cancer.”
Makes the heart sad–read it all.
Is this study done with the same scientific rigor that was used to get the 10% gay figure? I sense propaganda designed to induce a fear that will justify certain emergency steps taken in school clinics.
Our culture cannot advertize sex as a great form of pleasure that is to be enjoyed freely without paying a price. And the incidence of STD’s will be nothing compared to the spiritual and psychological damage done by those who have joined themselves as “one flesh” and then ripped that flesh apart through broken relationships or casual sex.
1 and 2 are both right. The data must be correct. And the culture cannot advertise free sex with embracing the consequences.
This figure must be suspect. I don’t know what the rate of transmission is, but for 25% of the teenage female population to be infected, it would seem to suggest that there is a 100% rate of sexual activity. I find this improbable.
I heard that 50% are sexually active, and of that 50%, 40% have some type of the most common STDs – from what I heard, this study does not include rarer STDs, like HIV. I heard this today on the radio so I don’t have a source I can cite.
http://www.cdc.gov/stdconference/
CDC is pretty good at sampling for disease incidence and 838 is a robust sample size (believe it or not) if sampled correctly. This looks to be accurate.
This study is based on data from the CDC’s ongoing survey of teenage health and safety issues. If it isn’t accurate, it is very close. In any case, this is the best (and almost the only reliable) data out there.
Frankly, the headlined conclusion isn’t that surprising. The median age for first intercourse among American youth, both boys and girls, is 16.8, with about 25% of the population active two years before that. The proportion who have unprotected sex at least occasionally is fairly high (the teenage auto accident rate tells us that kids that age regard themselves as invulnerable). Many of the girls, in particular, have first partners who are considerably older and have had multiple prior partners. As a result, about one in five teenagers acquire a sexually transmitted infection within their first year of sexual activity; about one in four girls 14 to 19 has an active infection at any given time.
The two most detailed summaries I have found online are the U.S.News story linked above by Kendall+ and [url=http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080311/ap_on_he_me/teen_stds]one by the AP Medical Editor[/url].
IF 25% of girls are infected – what is the % of boys ?
HPV is quite transmissible even with “protection,” so it wouldn’t be tied to the rate of “unprotected sex” (forgive the quotes, but c’mon). This is why public policy makers are so amenable to the vaccine proposals — when you see what we’re dealing with in terms of numbers, percentages, and pressure/forcible/non-consensual sexual activity (can i just say rape? almost, but i want to be clear), there’s a sad but compelling case for making it an across the board juvenile health care expectation.
This is the part of the report which I am sure will be left out of media reports “A study by CDC’s Sherry L. Farr and colleagues found that while the majority of sexually active 15- to-24 year-old young women (82 percent) receive contraceptive or STD/HIV services, few receive both (39 percent). In addition, only 38 percent of a subset of young women who reported receiving contraceptive services associated with unprotected sex (e.g., pregnancy testing) also received STD/HIV counseling, testing or treatment, which indicates that many women at high risk are not receiving necessary prevention services.”
This (and I will gladly be corrected) seems to show that the majority of the women and girls who were the subject of the study were not ignorant of condom usage. They had not received abstinence only education. Rather when they sought out either contraceptive services or information about STD’s they were not given complete information regarding risks of sexual behavior. It may be that where they received those services assumed they did not fall into high risk groups for contacting STDs. It may be that it was assumed someone seeking out contraceptive services already knew about STD risks.
The study has already been used to condemn abstinence education. But this is not a failure of abstinence education, it is a failure to make all necessary information and services available to women and girls who have made the decision to become sexually active. Women and girls who are obviously aware of contraceptives, else why seek out these services.
Re #11: Part of the problem appears to be that few young women’s primary care physicians are providing information or counseling on sexually transmitted infections—much less testing for them—because, as a doctor is quoted in one of the articles, “I can’t imagine that the sort of patients I see could have an STD.” I hope the publicity on this study makes them wake up and smell the coffee.
Ditto for the college health services that are (as the Farr study shows) providing birth control information, prescriptions, and supplies without also providing STD information or testing, probably because they also assume that their patients did not fall into a high risk group (I guess because they aren’t hooking on street corners).
To be fair, ditto also for girls (and boys) who believe their partner’s protestations of prior inexperience and absolute fidelity. From the viewpoint of disease transmission, you might as well sleep with all your partner’s partners, and their partners as well.
Teenagers have enough problems with considering themselves invulnerable and immortal without adults enabling their delusions. Everyone who is sexually active (or who has been sexually assaulted) is in a high risk group and the medical community should treat them as such.
This is from Wikipedia on “HPV” so the usual cautions apply, but it looks well sourced, as you can see in the original page — here’s the problem, which ends but did not start with the misconception that condoms protect and allow for “safe sex”:
Condoms
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that “While the effect of condoms in preventing HPV infection is unknown, condom use has been associated with a lower rate of cervical cancer, an HPV-associated disease.”[46]
According to Marcus Steiner and Willard Cates in the New England Journal of Medicine, “the protection that condoms offer cannot be precisely quantified.”[47] However, in a study reported in the same issue,[48] of 82 female university students followed for eight months, the incidence of genital HPV infection was 37.8 per 100 patient-years among women whose partners used condoms for all instances of intercourse, compared with 89.3 per 100 patient-years in women whose partners used condoms less than 5% of the time. The researchers concluded that “Among newly sexually active women, consistent condom use by their partners appears to reduce the risk of cervical and vulvovaginal HPV infection.”
Other studies have suggested that regular condom use can effectively limit the ongoing persistence and spread of HPV to additional genital sites in individuals who are already infected.[49][50]
Thus, condom use may reduce the risk that infected individuals will progress to cervical cancer or develop additional genital warts. Planned Parenthood recommends condom use to reduce the risk of contracting HPV.[51]
Sorry, that long “quote” was meant to end with — If reading that reassures you about how condom use puts you in a safe zone, i recommend a refresher course in a) basic statistics, and b) Biology 101. This says to me “they don’t work, except sometimes, for some, mainly for pregnancy, but not much else.”
Freedom of choice.
TEC should say nothing since it chose to join with the cause of narcissism years ago.
Re #9: As far as I know, nobody has done a similar study on male teenagers. Several of these diseases are asymptomatic in men and their effects on male fertility and cancer incidence aren’t as well documented as in women. As a result, male infections have garnered less clinical interest. However, we can make inferences.
The age at which boys and girls begin having sex is essentially equal in most of the recent studies, as is the number of lifetime sexual partners (apart from prostitutes) and the frequency of sexual activity. This is one area where females really have acquired equality since the 1960s, for what it’s worth (as Kendall+ says, makes the heart sad). Since women can acquire a sexually-transmitted infection more easily than men, due to the biology of reproduction, the male rate of infection is probably no higher than the female rate, but probably isn’t enormously lower, either.
Last time I saw my OB-GYN, he told me about the new HPV test that he could perform when I got my Pap-smear (sorry if this is grossing out the guys). He said that 80% of women under 30 are now infected with HPV. Who knows how many men. My mouth gaped, to say the least. I guess that means that I have to agree with the vaccinationistas. A woman may be a virgin on her wedding night, and still get this virus, which can lead to cancer. I am stressing abstinence to my boys, and trust me, this factoid will go in my arsenal of reasons to stay celibate until marriage. Much prayer will help too. Will accept any sent from fellow readers of T19!!!!!
These numbers are of course predictable, so no one should be surprised. Indeed, the only surprise is that the numbers are not higher.
And here in Maine South Portland School system is giving contraceptives to girls in grades 6,7,8, so they are giving contraceptives to children. What will be the result of this practice? We can see the result before us. For adults to grant such permissiveness is to punish children for the adults’ transgressions. Will they stand and take the blame? Larry