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<p>[1</a> in 4 Teen Girls Has Sexual Disease](<a href=“http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VBB9D00&show_article=1]1”>http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8VBB9D00&show_article=1)</p>
<p>I keep reading these statistics and have no reason to doubt them, but I must say that I would be surprised (in fact, amazed) if 25 percent of the teens I know actually had an STD.</p>
<p>That’s because the STD that 19% of teenage girls has is HPV, which is often completely asymptomatic, but which increases the risk of eventual cervical cancer. The other, more symptomatic (and more treatable) STDs affect 1-4% of girls each.</p>
<p>Also, the incidence of infection is very unevenly distributed by ethnicity. If you know African-American teens, it is likely that far more than 25% of them have some sort of STD. They bring the average up. In most other ethnic groups, 25% of teens are not infected.</p>
<p>Note that the study looked at girls 14-19, and the 25% figure applies to the whole group. I haven’t seen the results broken out by age. Since I think in every meaningful group there is a significant difference between the sexual behavior of 14-year-olds and 19-year-olds, I would surmise that the STD rate for 19-year-olds is probably well in excess of 25%.</p>
<p>I watched this with interest. JHS is correct - the rate in African-American was about 50-60% positive.
They made another statement that I remember to be misleading - “despite education about condom use and safe sex the rate is 25%” - if I’m not mistaken, condoms do not prevent any of the common STDs, only HIV and hepatitis, and I’m not sure that condoms are 100% effective against those, they just greatly reduce the risk. I’m off to check those facts.</p>
<p>Back again, yes the statement was somewhat misleading - condoms reduce the risk of STDs including HIV, they are not 100% effective. Condoms are less effective in HPV and herpes than in HIV, hepatitis or gonorrhea.</p>
<p>Where are the boys/men in this study? Where did the girls get the STD’s?</p>
<p>The heterosexual boys/men got it from a girl/woman and “sexually transmitted” the disease to another girl. </p>
<p>What’s the point of your question?</p>
<p>I passed the article around the breakfast table this morning: kids are 17, 15 and 13. Haven’t had the followup conversation yet. I’m sure they’ll discuss it with friends today. Can’t wait for the analysis. They’re pretty well-educated on STD prevention/avoidance. Gardasil before sexual activity begins is warranted.</p>
<p>No kidding – Gardasil might as well have funded the study. Here’s another way to express the findings: almost half of teenage girls who have had intercourse one or more times have HPV.</p>
<p>Prefect, as JHS points out, the statistics were manipulated to make them look as dramatic as possible. The figures for boys would be similar, but the implications and consequences for young men are very different for some some of these infections - GC and chlyamidia, HPV, even herpes.</p>
<p>In the medical community, we have tended to downplay the STD aspect of HPV. The term “STD” carries a lot of mental and emotional baggage, even for us. If you asked me to list STDs, or discuss the function of an STD clinic, it wouldn’t include HPV right away. I’ve known nurses to call in tears, because they were going to demand a divorce because of a dysplasia diagnosis, and this was in the days before specific HPV testing, when it was not unheard of to overdiagnose a pap smear in the interest of getting definitive testing (biopsy) for pre-cancerous lesions. A few of those calls, and you become circumspect about tossing around the STD label, especially for a virus that 70% of the population will get at one time or another in their life.</p>
<p>Regarding the inclusion of HPV as a STD:
That’s like saying 1 in 4 teens consume drugs regularly (including coffee).</p>
<p>The point of the question is, where are the statistics on the percentage of teenage boys infected? STD’s in males(just as in females) are not without consequences whether gonococcal arthritis, genital warts Etc.</p>
<p>The 1 in 4 for teen girls is from the CDC. I suggest you look there.</p>
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What is your idea of a medical community? THis would be a very, very dangerous & misguided idea. HPV is an STD. The fact that a very large number of people will be infected with it does not change that fact. The CDC clearly classifies it as an STD & states that it can be transmitted even with condom use.</p>
<p>Let me say this again - in the medical community we HAVE (as in the past) tended to downplay the STD aspect of HPV.</p>
<p>There were very good reasons for this, mainly that it has only been in the past 5-10 years or so that we have had widely available confirmatory HPV testing. Prior to that, the only way that we could diagnose infection by HPV was through identification of viral changes on a Pap smear using cytology. At the same time we are looking for pre-malignant changes. Obviously, we want to err on the side of caution when evaluating pre-malignant changes - in other words when we saw changes that could be reactive or could be pre-malignant, we used special ambiguous terminology and asked for biopsies. Some patients turned out to have HPV infection, some didn’t, some we never knew for sure. </p>
<p>This is very different than the current situation of having an extremely sensitive and specific test for HPV. Although the standard test does not cover all serotypes, we can say with some certainty that a patient does or does not have one of the serotypes most closely associated with carcinoma - in other words that the patient does or does not have an STD.
How would you like to branded as having an STD based on a cytologic examination that is probably only 75% accurate at identifying and classifying the infection, AND that is skewed toward overcalling infection in attempt to not miss any pre-malignant changes? Personally, I would want my STD to be proven before I strangled my DH.</p>
<p>It is not a coincidence that you are just in the past few years beginning to hear more and more about HPV as an STD. We have suspected it for a long time, but longitudinal data (long being 20 years, because the latency period from first infection to invasive cancer can be as long as 20-30 years, although it can be as short as 2 years, typical it is 15-20) finally showed that almost all cervical cancer is caused by HPV - without HPV it would be a rare disease indeed. This kind of proof takes years to develop.
And, until Gardisil, there was little that could be done to prevent it. You can preach abstinence, but when upwards of 70% of the population has it, only the sexual habits of nuns would help. At the time of the sexual revolution of the 60s and 70s, we were only beginning to understand the possibility of a relationship between the wart virus and cervical cancer - what we knew for sure was that cervical cancer was extremely rare in nuns and more common in prostitutes and women who had had multiple sexual partners for whatever reasons - not much beyond that. Thank God for the Pap smear, because without it we would have had an epidemic of death worse than AIDS in the 80s and 90s. Only abstinence really slows HPV down, and our moms adn sisters of the sexual revolution were having none of that.</p>
<p>Thanks, doc. I think even I understood that.</p>
<p>Your explanation doesn’t change the fact that HPV is an STD. The honest thing to do would be shout from the rooftops that abstinence will slow down disease transmission. But that’s not politically correct, is it?</p>
<p>Women have been tricked by any “medical comunity” that would cloak the reality of the risks of sex. Sex with a condom is not safe sex. Safer, yes. But not completely safe. And that is the false sense of security that many young women have been acting under.</p>
<p>Actually, uuhhh, StickerShock, in my political slant it iIS politically correct to shout abstinence from the rooftops, and HPV isn’t the main reason - we actually some pretty good prevention and treatment strategies for that.</p>
<p>The point is that it is not enough to shout abstinence - I think the phrase is “necessary, but not sufficient”. As a Mom, a Christian, as an MD speaking to individuals, my message would be that abstinence is the best first choice for all young people, for a number of health reasons - physical and emotional. But, I have to couple that with my public health message, and that includes condoms, birth control and HPV vaccination.
The true strength of HPV vaccination is that hopefully, eventually, it will be done early in life like most other vaccinations, and get it completely out of the moral arena and into the public health arena where it more properly belongs. </p>
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<p>I think you misunderstand - the risks of sex were never cloaked. HPV was for many years not publically promoted as an STD because it is transmissible with less than complete intercourse, unlike many STDs, and it is so infectious that nothing short of complete abstinence for life is 100% effective - that is asking a lot of most men and women. It is the real model for “when you have sex, you have sex with every person that your partner has ever known”. There were plenty of reasons for doctors to recommend abstinence to their patients - like pregnancy.</p>
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<p>No, it’s politically correct, it’s just not realistic. Given how easily HPV infects partners, how much of the population is infected, and how statistically not persuasive abstinence education is, preaching abstinence as a primary preventor of HPV (which is truthful) would have little effect on infection rates.</p>
<p>As cangel said, the reason HPV is somewhat downplayed as an STD is because STDs in many people’s minds bring up instant images of husbands off dallying with dirty prostitutes or wives bedding the postman, when in reality neither is likely the case with HPV. Doctors have to tread a fine line with their bedside manner between maximal information and maximal comfort, and saying “you’ve got HPV, it’s an STD, if you weren’t such a dirty promiscuous slut you’d be clean” isn’t the optimum in this case (yes, exaggerated, but you see my point).</p>
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<p>Unfortunately, that ship sailed long ago. Most medical literature discussing STDs that is for layman consumption is very clear that no sex is absolutely safe, but the fact is that as a group, women tend to have made the choice that the benefit of having sex is larger for them than the risks (assuming precautions like condoms etc.). The medical community emphasizing that no sex is safe sex some more isn’t likely to change that fact.</p>
<p>Is this going to be like the Alcohol thread? If we were better parents our kids wouldn’t have sex before marriage? :)</p>
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The message that no sex is truly safe is NOT emphazsized at all. Why do you think most teens think condoms are the magic answer? They are not being given the truth, because risks are downplayed. The attitude of cangel & 1of42 is a patronizng one. I had hoped that all medical professionals had moved beyond the days of patting patients on the head, handing out placebos, telling diabetics “you have sugar,” and dismissing their ability to be involved in healthcare decisions. I guess some are still clinging to the good old days.</p>
<p>MOWC: I think we would all be better parents, educators, and public health advocates if we simply told the TRUTH. Most laypeople have no real idea of the risks involved with having sex, regardless of age or marital status or political views. Because those risks have been hidden from them. Be truthful. Then everyone can make up his own mind about when, where, and with whom to have sex, knowing what the consequences are beforehand.</p>