Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released a study that found that a staggering 3.2 million teenage girls have a sexually transmitted disease--that's 25% of girls between the ages of 13 and 19, kids.

And I was somewhat surprised to see that the Wall Street Journal (where I go for medical advise) suggest that "Teen STD Rates Cause for Concern, Not Panic."

(sigh)

I wonder exactly when they think it's time to panic...or are they assured that their teen tots aren't teen tarts?

In the invervening week, we've been so awash with strum und drang over Barack Obama's speech and its embedded Islamofacist coded messages (which, apparently, can clearly be clearly heard if one plays the speech backwards...good luck with that), that we've missed the point here: our girls are having more and riskier sex and the teen birth rate is climbing for the first time in 15 years. According to Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America,"the national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure, and teenage girls are paying the real price." Strangely, girls have equated "sex" with vaginal penetration and are opting for more anal and oral sex--certainly a boon for the boys.

Now, here's the part the part that baked my noodle: rates of STD infection were nearly half for Black girls (48%) and 20% for whites and Mexican-Americans with human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, herpes, or trichomoniasis, with HPV topping the list. Oh, and this cheered my heart: The study, strangely, didn't even include syphilis, HIV or gonorrhea.

Oh, and the high rate of infection among Black girls is driving up the rate overall.

With the lower rates of use of formal medical facilities for wellness care (due to historical--or hysterical--fears of the medical community, poverty or other socioeconomic or personal accountability factors), it's no wonder that as these Black girls grow (the rest of the way) up into Black women, they are at least 50% more likely to die from cervical cancer than their white sisters.

We're failing to get the message across to our children--boys and girls--that skin-to-skin contact, while pretty yummy, can have serious consequences when the afterglow dims.

Lalita Amos's blog | login or register to post comments