Mediocre journalism and journalists love to do "trends" pieces, which amount to what "what my friends' friend and the taxi driver said."

Teenage Sex and Drug behavior is always a favorite topic.
Happily for the reality based community many actual surveys exist.

One that is important in my profession is the  Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) that the CDC does in collaboration with State health departments.

They have just released a new report: Trends in HIV- and STD-Related Risk Behaviors Among High School Students --- United States, 1991--2007 which since it is not a restricted report, I am going to quite in full (sans tables & references) below. For those interested in the full range of youth risky behavior, beyond just sex & drugs, there is also this report and the full website.

And yes, there is a similar survey done for Adult's risk behavior.

I'd been hearing about this "Punished with a baby" quote from a town hall meeting in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  I had not seen the whole quote in context yet so I thought I post it.

The question Obama was addressing was on AIDs prevention and his opinion on Abstinence-only education.  

"When it comes specifically to HIV/AIDS, the most important prevention is education, which should include -- which should include abstinence education and teaching the children -- teaching children, you know, that sex is not something casual. But it should also include -- it should also include other, you know, information about contraception because, look, I've got two daughters. 9 years old and 6 years old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby. I don't want them punished with an STD at the age of 16. You know, so it doesn't make sense to not give them information."

He was trying to make the point that teaching about condom use not only will help prevent AIDS but also reduce teen pregnancy.  An unfortunate choice of words but I think his opinion is in line with the beliefs of most Americans.

America’s Sex Problem

There was a report released by the Center for Disease Control on March 11, 2008 that shows some disturbing trends in American Teens (that I’m sure is replicated in Adults as well).

As reported by the AP:

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.

[snip]

The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26 percent, which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. They released the results Tuesday at an STD prevention conference in Chicago.

Teen pregnancy is also on a rise.

Hop skip or jump. . .

Here's a completely unacceptable statistic:  According to the CDC, more than three million teen girls have a sexually transmitted infection (STI).  That's one in four.

Crossposted from Left Toon Lane, Bilerico Project & My Left Wing


click to enlarge

An AP article linked via Huffingtonpost.com  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

reveals the results of another study on abstinence education. It doesn't work.

An article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times describes recent action in the Democratic controlled House of Representatives to provide additional funding for the federal abstinence-only-until-marriage program.

During the coming months, both the House and the Senate will have several opportunities to either eliminate this ineffective program, reduce its funding, or continue it. According to the LA Times article, it seems that no one wants to look like they are voting against abstinence.

Holy.Effin'.Doo-Doo...

As the Reporter Said to the Prostitute: "Trust me, this is Huge..."

I can just imagine heads exploding in FreeperLand if this product makes it to market as billed:

AN experimental sex lubricant designed by Australian researchers could help block both HIV and genital herpes, a study suggests.

Did you catch that?

A sex lubricant that could potentially protect anyone doing the horizontal mamba from the twin scourges of genital herpes and, hugely, HIV infection??

Are you kiddin' me?

(flip)

Another right wing failure.  Hopefully by the time Bush is out of office, all these half-baked economic and social reforms will have been shown to be the shams they always were.  Abstinence-only is the latest Republican fiasco.  For a bunch of gun fanatics, you’d think the expression "shot-gun wedding" would have came to mind when they went off on this abstinence tangent.  After $1.4 billion dollars and who knows how many unwanted pregnancies and STD’s, a recent Mathematica Policy Research Inc. report showed that students who participated in an abstinence-until-marriage program were just as likely to have sex as those who did not.

Current funding for abstinence programs is likely to end on June 30, according to Rep. John Dingell who has called it a "colossal failure".  This shouldn’t mean that we throw up our hands and accept these outcomes as inevitable.

JUMP

In response to Friday's news reports about the failure of abstinence education, the White House has stated it will continue pursuing the failed policy.  This leads me to wonder:  what is the purpose of abstinence education?  Why is it being taught in schools?

As best I can tell abstinence education seems to consist only of no sex before marriage.  Why?  Because that is the only true way to avoid things like STDs and unwanted pregnancies.  If that's the case then we have a problem:  abstinence education is preventing neither.  

Study after study shows abstinence education does not work.  There is no way conservatives could not know this too.  One would think they would take the pragmatic approach and fill the students in the other things that help prevent STD's and unwanted pregnancies, like condoms.  But no, and that is precisely where their argument falls flat.

The NYT today is reporting on a recommended change for doctors in the treatment of the #2 sexually transmitted infection in the US, gonorrhea .  This is due to a spike in the incidence of infections resistant to the fluoroquinolone antibiotics (think Ciprofloxacin), which effectively leaves physicians with only one kind of medicine approved for use in the US and:  

No new antibiotics for gonorrhea are in the pipeline, officials of the centers told reporters by telephone.

Link to the story, and more below the fold.

I may as well get a confession out of the way: I deliberately chose a provocative - and somewhat misleading - headline for this diary. I figured hey, if it's good enough for Fox News, it's good enough for me, right?