Fill in the blank: ____ is NOT a priority for most men.

Alright, it's not strictly a bioethics issue or controversy, but it is an article in a medical journal and the article did grab my attention:

The Journal of Sexual Medicine interviewed 28,000 men in Europe and the Americas and found, when assessing their priorities, that males between the ages of 20 and 75 ranked "honor" and "getting respect from their peers" ahead of having sex.

According to the FoxNews article, "About one-third of respondents said being healthy was the most important factor, 26 percent valued a happy family and 19 percent said they most valued being in a good relationship. Only 2 percent placed a satisfying sex life as their top priority."

A Quarter of Teenage Girls Test Positive For STDs

I'm just going to sit here and sip my coffee and let that title, and that statistic, sink in for a moment. A quarter of teenage girls test positive for sexually transmitted diseases. Go ahead and ponder it, I'll be here when you're done. Surely, you're thinking, it's not that bad! This must be sensationalistic reporting, or perhaps a matter of mistaking statistics or numbers or...

Okay, I admit. I stretched the truth a smidge to get the alarming title. In reality, the first national study of four common sexually transmitted diseases (chlamydia, HPV, trichomoniasis, and genital herpes) found that one in four teenage girls are infected with at least one of these diseases.

Oh. Clarifying that didn't really make it any better, did it?

Let's look at the numbers before we talk further, shall we? Always good to have those in front of us, whenever talking about straight up statistical analysis. According to the New York Times,

838 participants in the study were chosen at random with standard statistical techniques. Of the women asked, 96 percent agreed to submit vaginal swabs for testing. Extrapolating from the findings, 3.2 million teenage women were infected with at least one of the four diseases [emphasis added]. Because the new survey was based on direct testing, it was more reliable than analyses derived from data that doctors and clinics sent to the diseases center through state and local health departments.

To say that this suggests abstinence-only education is a complete and utter failure is, I think, a healthy understatement at best. And the numbers suggest something else, as well: abstinence-only education also hits minority communities harder, doing more damage, than the white communities. In this particular study, nearly half of the 14-19 year old black women had at least one of the four STDs being looked at, while only 20% of the white girls were similarly infected. Among these infected women, nearly 15% had multiple infections - of these four. Who knows what other infections were also piggybacked on top of the rest.

And of course, these infections all have the ability to present invisibly, for both men and women, meaning that not only is there a potential for continued widespread infection, but that it's very likely both women and men will end up with fertility problems down the line, thanks to the scarring that these diseases can cause (especially when they shift into pelvic inflammatory disease).

I'm not sure how people can look at these numbers and see anything other than earthshattering disaster for abstinence-only education. Something like a billion dollars has been spent on something that conclusively does not work. Not only does it not work, it is putting our teens, our children, at serious and significant health risk, not only for the immediate but for their future health, as well.

I've taught sex ed, and I know it can be uncomfortable. I've had to teach sex ed to my relatives, so I know how that can be even worse than sitting down with strangers. It can be embarrassing. Questions can be asked that you don't want to answer, or don't know how to answer - but we, socially, culturally, religiously, politically, need to get over it. Comprehensive sexuality education doesn't have to be about giving permission to have sex whenever; it's very much a whole body/being approach to teaching that doesn't just emphasize safe sex, but it also can (and should) emphasize things like waiting for what is morally right for the individual, cover things like protecting yourself from abuse, being comfortable in your own gendered skin, taking care of your plumbing; comprehensive sex ed is not about encouraging orgies, it's about encouraging responsibility and agency. We have to embrace this - and if we don't, then as a society, those infections are just as much our responsibility as it is the teenagers actually having the sex.

-Kelly


Oh, as a side note: the researchers in this particular situation did something I'd really love to see more often. While the survey was anonymous and they have no way of knowing which women were infected, they did inform all participants of the finding results and treatment recommendations via a password protected phone number, and they sent multiple reminders to the women who did not call in to the line. This keeps confidentiality, while still going well above and beyond what most researchers seem to do in these situations - it would be great if this could become the norm, rather than a pleasant surprise in a completely depressing article.

HIV Preventative Significant Boost for Women

Researchers at the University of Alabama (UAB) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine say an experimental anti-HIV gel being tested in Phase II trial studies is safe for women to use on a daily basis. The gel, called tenofovir, was successfully applied by non-HIV infected women patients, daily, over 6 months, as a prevention for HIV infection. The drug is being tested in trials conducted under the authority of a consortium of researchers, exploring and evaluating anti-HIV microbicides. The researchers are a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded Microbicide Trials Network.
200 sexually active HIV-negative women were included in the study. Participants were age 19 to 50, and 64 percent were married. The goal was to determine the drug's safety if used daily, and the woman's willingness to apply it according to directions.

Results from the tenofovir study comes as welcome news to this segment of the HIV/AIDs prevention research community, following on the heels of unsuccessful late-stage trial testing of other drugs, including another gel, carraguard, (which our blogger Sean Philpott had blogged about earlier this month) which failed to prevent HIV infection in 6,000 South African women tested. That study ended in 134 new HIV infections in the carraguard group, and 151 new infections in the placebo group. A year ago, two other late-stage drug trials for similar preventative gels were stopped due to fears the drugs would accelerate a women's chances of infection instead of decreasing it. Researchers acknowledged that low use of the gel by participants may have played a role in adversely affecting the results.

In South Africa, some 8,000 women develop HIV infection each day.