Posted on 03/12/2008 6:45:47 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
At least one in four teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease, suggests a first-of-its-kind federal study that startled some adolescent-health experts.
Some doctors said the numbers might be a reflection of both abstinence-only sex education and teens' own sense of invulnerability. Because some sexually transmitted infections can cause infertility and cancer, U.S. health officials called for better screening, vaccination and prevention.
Only about half of the girls in the study acknowledged having sex. Some teens define sex as only intercourse, yet other types of intimate behavior, including oral sex, can spread some diseases.
Among those who admitted having sex, the rate was even more disturbing - 40% had an STD.
High rates of sexually transmitted disease continue to be problematic for Milwaukee, which led the nation in the number of new chlamydia cases reported in 2005, according to a report released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in October. The city is planning to add more managers and outreach workers to its STD/HIV clinics this year.
Among Wisconsin high school students surveyed in 2007, 44.6% reported ever having sex, while 32.9% reported having sex with one or more partners in the past three months, according to a state report. Of those who recently had sex, 61.4% said that they used a condom.
The same report found that 9,628 teens ages 15 to 19 were infected with either chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis or genital herpes in 2006. The majority of the cases were in Milwaukee County, where nearly 80% of cases occurred within 10 city ZIP codes - 53206, 53210, 53205, 53212, 53218, 53216, 53208, 53209, 53225, 53224.
Responding to the federal report released Tuesday, Elizabeth Alderman, an adolescent medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center's Children's Hospital in New York, said: "This is pretty shocking."
"To talk about abstinence is not a bad thing," but teen girls - and boys, too - need to be informed about how to protect themselves if they do have sex, she added.
Ellen Kruger, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, agreed, saying that teens need to hear the dual message that STDs can be prevented by abstinence and condoms.
The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26%, which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, researchers with the CDC found. They released the results at an STD prevention conference in Chicago.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the study shows that "the national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure, and teenage girls are paying the real price."
Similar claims were made last year when the government announced the teen birth rate rose between 2005 and 2006, the first increase in 15 years.
The new study by CDC researcher Sara Forhan relied on slightly older data. It is an analysis of nationally representative records on girls ages 14 to 19 who participated in a 2003-'04 government health survey.
The teens were tested for four infections: human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer and affected 18% of girls studied; chlamydia, which affected 4%; trichomoniasis, 2.5%; and genital herpes, 2%.
John Douglas, director of the CDC's division of STD prevention, said the results are the first to examine the combined national prevalence of common sexually transmitted diseases among adolescent girls. He said the data, now a few years old, likely reflect current prevalence rates.
Disease rates were significantly higher among black girls; nearly half had at least one STD, vs. 20% among whites.
Read closely. They blame “abstinence”!
Amazing, isn’t it?
It is not just Bill Clinton we should be thanking. Years ago I read a magazine article which stated that kids who watch movies with teen sex, drinking and drug use take up that kind of behavior because they think it will make them cool and that kids who weren’t engaging in that behavior thought there was something the matter with them because they didn’t. Hollywood and t.v. deserve a big chunk of the blame. It is up to us parents to help them sort though all this crap.
Just one of many consequences of moral relativism, which holds that the meaning and value of human beliefs have no absolute value or truth; that all truth is relative to the individual based on cognitive, racial, socioeconomic, cultural and experiential grounds; that all viewpoints are equally valid; and, relativism denies that any viewpoint is uniquely privileged over all others.
I imagine you’re talking about HPV virus that can lead to cervical cancer. But since it’s a STD, boys get it too, it just doesn’t cause cervical cancer (obviously) in them. There has been discussion about giving the vaccine to boys too.
“Think of it this way. If one in four have an STD, then THREE IN FOUR DO NOT.”
In two more years still, people will rejoice that HALF do not.
And on down it goes. I look at it this way: FOUR IN FOUR SHOULD NOT.
The puppet masters have been deliberately hyper-sexualizing our culture for many decades as another means of fracturing and degrading it. THEY are not surprised but are gleeful. Check out Soros’ goals and values if you doubt such.
They are also keenly interested in STD’s and their capacity to diminish the population size. Enslaving the target goal of 200 million is much easier than 6+ billion.
The era of the Olson twins and Binet Ramsey . . . sigh.
I don’t doubt the CDC numbers but this is a subversive attemp to push the HPV vaccine. You notice there are no mention of males in the study.
I fell this because our own governor good hair tried to force us to vaccinate our pre-pubescent daughters. Even my wife’s OB/Gyn tried to get us to do our 16 year old. She listened to his spiel and politely said she’ll get it when she needs it right before she marries.
Yes you naysayers can say we are naive but we know our daughter and she is a virgin and committed to being one when she marries and marrying one.
Funny, isn’t it, that you can easily get HPV while wearing a condom? Any doctor knows this. My guess is that they’re out asking Ph.D’s.
People please get a grip. This survey is worthless. It was taken using ~900 girls within 10 zip codes in inner city Milwakee. It has NO VALUE in predicting the VD rates in the rest of America.
Sex is pushed on kids 24/7 by those who profit from and take part in a Culture of Fornication.
The HPV rate is the real driver of the large number posted in this article. That HPV really is only sexually transmitted is debatable. One study claims that 14.8% of girls who have never had sexual contact have HPV:
http://www.jaoa.org/cgi/content/full/106/7/423
If that’s the case then the numbers reported in the present story are pretty meaningless - but make great ammunition for the agendas of certain people.
There are some seriously inner city north side Milwaukee zips there and a few that don't fit. I'm willing to wager that a few select zips out of the ten listed hold the majority of cases - not that I'm judging the "culture" and "diversity" that make Milwaukee special.
In statistics there is a component called “power.” What it means is whether a study of X number of people (or anything) can be extrapolated to make a statement of an definitive nature involving 100% of what is being studied. This is why many of the early drug studies done by phamaceutical companies for the FDA do not expose toxicities that later appear when the drug is mass marketed. Now I really wonder if a study of 838 young girls has the necessary power to conclude 25% of young girls in America have STDs. If there are any PhD statisticians out there, they can do the calculation. It is computer driven but I do not have the program or the knowledge to do the math. It is very easy to do though if you are trained.
I worked at a local prosector’s office years ago in the Sex Crimes/Child Abuse Unit. A report came in that a three year old had genital warts. It was reported to the office by her pediatrician. An investigation was launched and it was determined the child was not molested but had contracted the genital warts from a bath towel both her parents used (they had genital warts). Moral to the story don’t share bath towels if one or more of you has some kind of herpes or genital warts.
Here’s how “liberal solutions” “work”:
1) There is a consequence for a certain behavior, but that behavior is only being chosen by a very limited set of the population.
2) “Liberals” come up with a “solution” that alleviates this consequence.
3) “Liberals” are surprised when the set of those choosing the behavior dramatically increases (due to the removal of the consequence).
4) “Liberals” claim the problem was worse than anyone ever thought, and demand more public funding to alleviate the consequence.
5) Go to step 3.
My feeling is the the study is definitely cooked — taking selected zips to present the worst case stories from a city that boasts one of the nation’s highest teen birth rates.
I wouldn’t worry about the responses, the sampling is deliberately skewed to produce the desired result - a “stunning” high rate of incidence. Math alone won’t give you the qualitative facts about the community being studied.
>>>>>
Milwaukee recorded 1,869 births to mothers under 20 in 2004. That’s 16.9 percent of all births in the city and nearly double the state’s teen birth rate of 8.7 percent. The national average is 12.1 percent.
Nationally, each teen pregnancy costs taxpayers an average of at least $79,320 in long-term costs.
Among the worst
Milwaukee is among the 10 cities with the highest teen birth rates among the nation’s 50 largest cities. Milwaukee’s rate is higher than Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City and Los Angeles.
http://milwaukee.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/stories/2006/06/12/story1.html?i=47084%20
You are so right. I wanted to include other demogrphic variables as a necessary part of any legitimate study but thought it would be too much. One fascinating thing is that there is a medical professional making sweeping statments on the use of condoms, abstinence etc based on this obviously inadequate study. This is how a lot of garbage information seeps into the popular knowledge base.
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