Spring Break
Experts promote safe sex options
By: Kenny Ryan
Issue date: 2/14/08 Section: News
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The American Social Health Association website maintains updated statistics and information on venereal diseases. It estimates that more than half of all people will have a sexually transmitted disease or infection at some point in their lifetime. Even more worrisome for the college crowd, about half of all new STD and STI cases reported in the year 2000 occurred in youth between the ages of 15 and 24.
"A lot of STDs have no symptoms, and people don't know they have them," said Rhonda Rahn, the health education coordinator at the A.P. Beutel Health Center. "[This is especially true] with chlamydia and gonorrhea. Eighty percent of people with chlamydia don't know they have it, so they spread it to other people. [Then] that person has symptoms, but the original person doesn't even know they had it. There's a lot that goes unreported."
Rahn said that chlamydia is the most common bacterial STI and human papoloma virus is the most common virus. In 2007, an HPV vaccine was widely publicized when Texas Gov. Rick Perry tried to make it mandatory for young women.
"[The HPV vaccine] prevents spread of four of the types strains of HPV that cause the most cervical cancers," Rahn said. "HPV is the virus that causes warts all over the body. There are about 30 strains that love the genital area, and of those strains, four of them cause about 90 percent of cervical cancer. I look at it as a cancer preventing vaccine.
"It's one of those things that has just barely been out, just for over a year, so people might want to wait a few years. It's been shown to be effective, but only in the lab for long periods of time. In 10 years, we don't know if it will still be effective," she said.
Men do not have to worry about HPV causing cervical cancer, Rhonda said, because they don't have cervices.
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