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Archive for the ‘STDs’ Category

“Doing it” less, later

Friday, March 18th, 2011

The Centers for Disease Control delivered a little healthier news report about the sexual behaviors of the 15- to 24-year old age group:

Fewer teens and young adults are having sex, a government survey shows, and theories abound for why they’re doing it less. Experts say this generation may be more cautious than their predecessors, more aware of sexually spread diseases. Or perhaps emphasis on abstinence in the past decade has had some influence.

Or maybe they’re just too busy.

“It’s not even on my radar,” said 17-year-old Abbey King of Hinsdale, Ill., a competitive swimmer who starts her day at 5 a.m. and falls into bed at 10:30 p.m. after swimming, school, weight lifting, running, more swimming, homework and a volunteer gig working with service dogs for the disabled.

The study [released March 3, 2011] is based on interviews of about 5,300 young people, ages 15 to 24. It shows the proportion in that age group who said they’d never had oral, vaginal or anal sex rose in the past decade from 22 percent to about 28 percent.

There are other surveys of sexual behavior, but this is considered the largest and most reliable. “It’s the gold standard,” said Bill Albert, chief program officer for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Read the AP news release here.

Posted in Abstinence, HPV, Intimacy, STDs, Sex Ed | No Comments »

Women pay ‘the price for free love’

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Virginia Ironside was a 17-year-old in 1961 when the birth control pill was first licensed in Britain. She chronicles the ugly side of the swinging 60s sexual revolution for women in a UK Daily Mail article.

Virginia Ironside at age 20

The culture shock:

In the 50s, sex was completely taboo. At Woman magazine, where I worked a decade later, the journalists weren’t ever allowed to use the word ‘bottom’ – not even in ‘bottom of the garden’ or ‘bottom of the saucepan’. They couldn’t print the word ‘menstruation’…

…we’d been brought up to say ‘no to sex, but the only reason for that was because we might get pregnant. And if we’d got pregnant then of course we might have been thrown out of our parents’ home, or forced to give the baby up for adoption. Before the law changed in 1967 there were abortionists around, but they were illegal, and you couldn’t go to one without paying a lot of money in used notes to a dodgy doctor off Harley Street.

It was a ‘man’s world’:

If you can imagine emerging from this repressed background into the swinging 60s, equipped with a contraceptive pill that had only recently become the hugely popular and completely reliable form of birth control, you can also imagine how ill-prepared we all were for what was to follow.

(more…)

Posted in Hooking-up, STDs, Sexuality | No Comments »

Jury: $2.4 Million for Herpes Transmission

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

We’ve been told that hooking up costs society big bucks in health care costs, but it just got very expensive on a personal level for one California man.

A Beverly Hills man has been hit with a $2.4 million judgment in a suit alleging that he negligently infected his soon-to-be-ex wife with genital herpes.

The unfortunate transmission occurred after the defendant and his wife reconciled following a month-long split in mid-2007, according to the complaint. Not long after they kissed and made up, the plaintiff began experiencing “severe burning, itching and swelling,” and was diagnosed with genital herpes shortly thereafter.

It was only after this diagnosis that the plaintiff learned that her husband engaged in unprotected sex with several women outside their marriage, behavior that the complaint described as “high-risk.”

The award, which was handed down by a Los Angeles jury, gave the wife $500,000 for past pain and suffering, $1.63 million for future pain and suffering, $250,000 for future medical damages, and $62,000 in punitive damages.

“Herpes litigation is surprisingly common,” notes the article, although perhaps not so surprising given the prevalence of the disease: 16% of all Americans – “and a stunning 48% of black women” – carry the HSV-2 disease. Worse, “80% of those who have the virus never experience outbreaks or even know that they are infected.”

The $2.4 million judgment in this case “pales in comparison” to a jury award of $6.7 million last year to a woman who “contracted herpes after sleeping with a wealthy businessman.”

The plaintiff’s attorney in that case said the eye-popping verdict was “a clear message to all persons infected with a sexually transmitted disease that this type of behavior simply will not be tolerated.”

Posted in Hooking-up, STDs | No Comments »

Divorcing sex from feelings and attachment

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

The Week had a thoughtful article recently on love in the time of hooking up (full article posted here and here).

“In the dating era, students would go on a date, which might lead to something sexual,” says Kathleen Bogle, a sociologist at Philadephia’s La Salle University. “In the hookup era, students hook up, which might lead to dating.”

Is hooking up harmful? Depends on whether you ask peers or professionals.

Many college kids scoff at that very question. They say they’re just having fun, and that as long as both people understand the terms, it’s win-win. But some health professionals have raised alarms about the spread of sexually transmitted disease, and warn that many young adults are paying a price for learning to divorce sex from feelings and attachments.

“They don’t learn to build that emotional intimacy before they get physically intimate,” says adolescent gynecologist Melissa Holmes. “They may grow up not knowing how to connect with a partner on an intimate level.”

James Cox, director of the counseling center at the University of Pittsburg, says more than a quarter of his clients come in with anxiety, depression, and other emotional problems because their relationships feel superficial and confusing.

“Hooking up is like any other kind of peer pressure,” he says. “We need to encourage students to make independent, healthy choices.” That may be especially true for women.

Why especially for women?

(more…)

Posted in Alcohol, Hooking-up, STDs, Sexuality | No Comments »

No health care for STDs, drunkenness and other ‘failures of personal responsibility’

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

Though he doesn’t heed his own advice, New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has no hesitation forcing others to live by it.

Emboldened by successful drives to reduce smoking, obesity and the use of trans fats in New York city, mayor Michael Bloomberg today opened a new front in healthy living for New Yorkers by launching a campaign to reduce consumption of salt.

If a politician can grab this kind of power from a non-health care political office, imagine the kind of power he’d wield if he were appointed to a seat on some future nationalized Health Care Panel charged with making policy decisions about who gets what kind of medical care.

‘Personal responsibility’ and ‘disease prevention’ loom large in the current national health care reform debate. But what if ‘personal responsibility’ became a condition for obtaining medical care? A history of good behavior gave someone a pass to the head of the medical treatment line, while bad behavior relegated one to the end of the line or out of the queue altogether?

Who would define ‘good’ and ‘bad’? Politicians, of course. And that should terrify everyone regardless of his or her political persuasion.

(more…)

Tags: behavior, health care, Mayor Bloomberg, personal responsibility, reform, STDs
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Testing Condoms

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Consumer Reports Health found that 19 of 20 brands of latex condoms passed the test for strength, reliability, leakage, and package integrity.

But the Tampa Bay article, In the Market for Condoms?, added these caveats:

(more…)

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“Gardasil researcher drops a bombshell”

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Several bombshells actually. At the 4^thInternational Public Conference on Vaccination in Reston VA last month, Dr. Diane Harper – a lead researcher in the development of two human papilloma virus vaccines, Gardasil and Cervarix, and a consultant to the World Health Organization – surprised her audience with several statements that undercut the case for mass HPV vaccination in the US:

(more…)

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And the world will know

Monday, September 28th, 2009

A new law enacted in the February Stimulus bill requires doctors, hospitals and other health care providers to create an Electronic Health Record (EHR) for every American by 2014. A person’s EHR would, of course, include a personal “medical history and problems list,” accessible to other health care providers along with your friendly government bureaucrats.

Libertarians and conservatives don’t like the EHR idea, and we hear it isn’t sitting well with the ‘anything goes’ sex-wingers either.

(more…)

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