Rachel Allison
Last week I wrote about Hydeia Broadbent, a young woman’s crusade to stop HIV/AIDS.
This week I want to write about some of the “lesser” sexually-transmitted diseases and other problems that are caused by “hooking up.”
There are 19 million new infections of sexually transmitted gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis yearly, which cost $17 billion to treat each year. But there are others—human papillomavirus, herpes, genital warts, hepatitis, trichomoniasis, and scabies, to name just a few. The World Health Organization says that there “are more than 30 different sexually transmissible bacteria, viruses and parasites.” Treatment for those in the United States is also in the billions of dollars per year—that is when they’re treatable and not drug resistant.
Assuming that everyone who is having sex is aware of STDs, I am quite sure that they don’t understand the consequences that those diseases will bring to their lives. One woman tells her story when she learned she had Genital Herpes. I can’t imagine the emotional trauma such a discovery would cause. As a teenager my doctor told me I had athlete’s foot, and emotionally I felt “dirty” until the creams and ointments cleared up the fungus.
Unfortunately, casual sex is expected by too many, and practically revered by leftists. Enter Sandra Fluke publicly demanding that free contraception be given to all sexually-active women. I wonder why someone didn’t argue that the monetary cost of complimentary contraception is miniscule compared with the cost of treating the STD’s that will be transmitted during all that “free” sex.
The facts:
- According to a recent CDC (Center for Disease Control) survey only 60% of high-school students who have had sex used a condom the last time they had intercourse.
50% of HS students say they’ve had sex at least once. (This statistic may be low because many don’t consider oral sex as “sex.”)
- According to the AP article entitled “1 in 4 teen girls has a sexually transmitted disease” not only did 25 percent of teenage girls have an STD, “among those who admitted to having sex, the rate was even more disturbing—40 percent had an STD.” Black girls suffered worst: 48 percent of them had an STD.
The National Cancer Institute at the National Institute of Health stated that the human papillomavirus, which is “spread through direct skin-to-skin contact during vaginal, anal, and oral sex, causes virtually all cervical cancers and most anal cancers and some vaginal, vulvar, penile, and oropharyngeal cancers (cancers in the middle part of the throat.)” And the risk isn’t limited to women. The title of a 2011 NBCNews.com article adequately sums up the situation: “Cancer spike, mainly in men, tied to HPV from oral sex.” The article added that “we can expect some 10,000 to 15,000 patients with the oropharyngeal cancers per year in the United States, with the great majority having HPV-positive (cancers.) “High risk HPV infections account for approximately 5 percent of cancers worldwide.”
According to the CDC, “Chlamydia and gonorrhea are important preventable causes of infertility,” even though “most women infected with Chlamydia or gonorrhea have no symptoms. There are “an estimated 2.8 million cases of Chlamydia and 718,000 cases of gonorrhea that occur annually in the United States.” Each year untreated STDs cause 24,000 women in the US to become infertile.” STD’s cause approximately one-fourth of all infertility in women, and treatment to rectify infertility can be very costly.
I won’t elaborate on how STD’s affect babies. But babies can get the dread disease from their mothers causing stillbirths, low birth weight (less than five pounds), conjunctivitis (eye infection) pneumonia, neonatal sepsis (infection in the baby’s blood stream), neurologic damage, blindness, deafness, acute hepatitis, meningitis, chronic liver disease, and cirrhosis.
STD’s truly are “the gift that keep on giving.”
Again I will ask, “Where is the outcry?” If there were enough voices outraged by the outright disregard of the issue that is bringing so much emotional and physical pain, death and monetary waste, maybe…just maybe we could help bring this deception to the forefront.