A recent CDC study that found that about 25% of U.S. girls and young women ages 14 to 19 have at least one of four common sexually transmitted infections is “enough to make you wonder why schools don’t do a better job of sex education,” Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy writes in an opinion piece.
Milloy questions the ability of many parents to educate their children about STIs and why there was no “public outcry” about human papillomavirus infections until a pharmaceutical company developed a vaccine. He adds that even though boys are “rarely involved” in STI studies, they are “definitely involved in the problem.”
According to Milloy, former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders “all but predicted” the current STI epidemic among teens. Elders’ “controversial remedies” of giving condoms to students at school — as well as “making sex education fun while keeping it real” and suggesting masturbation was the “safest sex this side of abstinence” — brought “much-needed attention to an impending crisis, Milloy writes. However, the “frank talk” about sex and STI prevention that “left” the national dialogue after Elders resigned in 1994, and the “instinctual quest for sex” among today’s teens, now “carries the risk of unspeakable pain,” Milloy says (Milloy, Washington Post, 4/2).
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