50% of Americans will get sex disease by 25 years of age

Main Category: Sexual Health / STDs
Article Date: 24 Feb 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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According to a number of reports, 50% of America's youth will get a sexually transmitted disease (STD) by the time they are twenty-five years old.

Several reasons have been offered for this. The most likely is that young people in America are either ignorant about protection or are too embarrassed to ask for protection.

In the year 2000 there were 9 million new cases of STDs among under 24s in the USA.

If the American government continues telling schools to tell kids that abstinence is the only choice things will just get worse. Basically, telling this to kids is just playing the ostrich (pretending something is not happening when it is happening all around you).

Advocates for Youth is one such organisation. Their president, James Wagoner, said 'For the 27 million young Americans under the age of 25 who have had sex, the stakes are simply too high to talk only about abstinence. Given the prevalence of STDs, young people need all the facts -- including medically accurate information on condoms. Approximately 18.9 million new cases of STD occurred in 2000, of which 9.1 million (48 percent) were among persons aged 15 to 24."

The most common STDs among the young are genital warts (human papillomavirus), trichomoniasis and Chlamydia.

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