When children start having sex at a young age, she said, they’re having sex with high-risk partners who are older and are many times school dropouts.
The overall STD rate among the 838 girls in the study was 26 percent, which translates to more than 3 million girls nationwide, researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. They released the results this week at an STD prevention conference in Chicago.
Texas has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country, and Dr. Sulak said she anticipated the numbers would be the same or higher here.
Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the study shows that “the national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure, and teenage girls are paying the real price.”
Dr. Sulak disputes that claim.
Professor of obstetrics and gynecology with the Texas A&M College of Medicine and a Scott & White Memorial Hospital physician, Dr. Sulak was instrumental in the development of Scott & White’s abstinence-only program Worth the Wait sex education curriculum. The program is used in a number of Texas school districts.
Dr. Sulak spent Wednesday morning talking to about 500 middle school and high school boys and girls in McGregor. She talked to them about the benefits of not having sex - no STDs and no unplanned pregnancies.
“I also told them if they were having sex or were thinking about having sex, they needed to see a health care professional to reduce their risks,” she said.
Dr. Margaret Blythe, an adolescent medicine specialist at Indiana University School of Medicine, said in an Associated Press article that some doctors hesitate to discuss STDs with teen patients or offer screening because of confidentiality concerns, knowing parents would have to be told of the results.
Dr. Blythe, who heads an American Academy of Pediatrics committee on adolescence, noted that the academy supports confidential teen screening.
“If a teenager is sexually active, there is risk of communicable disease,” Dr. Sulak said. “Anytime someone is at risk for a communicable disease it is OK for a health care professional to examine them. It won’t be questioned because they are trying to help the child.”
At the high school level in Scott & White’s Worth the Wait sex education curriculum, contraception is discussed, she said.
“We talk to the kids and tell them it’s best if they don’t have sex and list all the benefits, but we also talk about what can be done to reduce their risk of pregnancy and STDs,” Dr. Sulak said.
Condoms reduce the risk of HIV by 80 to 90 percent, she said, and any child having sex better be using a condom.
“These kids have STDs because they are having sex,” Dr. Sulak said. “If they weren’t having sex the percentage with STDs would be zero.”
Condoms lower the risk, but unfortunately teens are the worst age group for using contraception reliably and correctly, she said.
“That’s why our program will continue to encourage kids not to have sex … that will be our No. 1 message,” Dr. Sulak said.
The new study by CDC researcher Dr. Sara Forhan relied on slightly older data. It is an analysis of nationally representative records on girls ages 14 to 19 who participated in a 2003-04 government health survey.
The teens were tested for four infections: human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer and affected 18 percent of girls studied; chlamydia, which affected 4 percent; trichomoniasis, 2.5 percent; and genital herpes, 2 percent.
jgibbs@temple-telegram.com
