And from around the country, health news that provokes the reaction: Yes? And? Your point being? How on earth can you possibly either be surprised by or not know this?
ABCNEWS.com : College Kids Ignore Risks of Unsafe Sex An alarming number of American college students engage in unprotected sex, but most fail to realize the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases, says a recent national survey. Among college students who live away from home, 56 percent had been sexually active while attending college, and 73 percent of that group reported having unprotected sex while in college, says the survey by the Society for Adolescent Medicine. Underscoring widespread ignorance about sexually transmitted diseases, the online survey of 516 students found that 68 percent of those who had unprotected sex did not believe they were at risk of contracting an STD.
And the surprise is ... what, exactly?
We're heading now into a solid generation of having had "just say no!" sex education. Which everyone knows doesn't work. And when you focus on "just say no!", there's relatively little information that gets absorbed on what happens when you don't -- even though most surveys indicate that the majority of adolescents and teens don't "just say no" to sex. (Those surveys also have a built in social desirability index problem. It's socially desirable for males to say they've had lots of sex, and it's socially desirable for teen and adolescent females to say they haven't had any at all. It's very likely that such surveys overstate the number of males who have had sex, and understate the number of females.) Frankly, I don't think it's that parents want to be their children's friends that contribute to the problem; it's that nobody wants to know about the problem. Parents and children in general don't, and really never have, talked that clearly about sex. Not as a general rule. And even if pediatricians did ask their patients if they were sexually active, how many would tell them? First, they know perfectly well that it's their doctor's responsibility to tell their parents what's happening; no protestations of confidentiality would suffice. And frankly, if pediatricians knew that their adolescent patients were having sex and they didn't tell the parents and the parents found out, the lawsuits would be a-flyin', and no jury would find for the doctor, especially if any of them were parents.
(Purely a side note: I would still dearly love to know why on earth nobody's come up with a vaccine for gonorrhea or syphilis. They're bacterial infections; shouldn't it be relatively simple as these things go to come up with one? Syphilis, at least, actually is deadly, if left untreated long enough.)
You do kind of feel sorry for college health services, though. They've got to deal with all these newly adult people who don't know things that they should have been taught when puberty reared its ugly head. How do you go about doing this type of elementary sex education that late in the day? And especially, how do you handle it without coming across as, "How the hell do you not know this stuff at 18, 19, 20?"
African American teen mothers have greater risk for low birth weight and premature babies (Healthnews.ws, August 29, 2003): A study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health finds that African American teens living in Baltimore, Md. are twice as likely to deliver low birth weight babies and 1.5 times more likely to have premature babies than whites. When compared to pregnant black women of all ages in Maryland, the study found the younger group had almost twice the infant mortality rate. * National Institutes of Health, NIH/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
African-American teens are twice as likely to deliver low-birth-weight babies and 1.5 times more likely to have premature babies than whites, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study, conducted by the School’s Center for Human Nutrition (CHN), examined birth outcomes of 1,120 pregnant African-American teens age 17 and younger, living in Baltimore, Md., and compared them to national data on white women. When compared to pregnant black women of all ages in Maryland, the study found the younger group had almost twice the infant mortality rate (2.3 percent vs. 1.3 percent). The study appears in the August 2003 edition of The Journal of Pediatrics.
Yes? And?
Given that African American teens are somewhat more likely to be poor and thus have poorer health care than whites, where's the surprise? The interesting question would be, if you control for income across races, is there still a significant difference, and if so, why? To be sure, this is essentially a very long abstract, and not the entire Journal of Pediatrics article, but controlling for income would be an important enough aspect that you'd think they'd shove it to the front of the study. Frankly, I suspect that the issue would still exist, independent of income, but there's no way to tell without that having been considered.
Posted by iain at September 03, 2003 11:59 AMComments
