Time for a gut-check

When 26% of the teenage girls in this country have a sexually transmitted disease, it's time to take stock of the idiotic "abstinence only" sex education that has gripped this country at the behest of the religious right wrong.

Good grief - teenagers are, to a one, idiots - and not ordinary run-of-the-mill idiots, either. They are idiots that have a sense of invulnerability. They think they are ten feet tall and bullet proof. Like I said - idiots. I was an idiot when I was a teenager, and so were you. So were my kids, and so were my parents, and so were yours. Idiocy is part of the teenage condition.

Combining that inherent teenage idiocy and invulnerability with abstinence only sex disinformation, you get a staggering STD rate, and an increase in teen pregnancies.

"This is pretty shocking," said Dr. Elizabeth Alderman, an adolescent medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center's Children's Hospital in New York.

"To talk about abstinence is not a bad thing," but teen girls — and boys too — need to be informed about how to protect themselves if they do have sex, Alderman said.

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.

The results of the study were reported on Tuesday by the CDC at a STD prevention conference in Chicago.

"Those numbers are certainly alarming," said sex education expert Nora Gelperin, who works with a teen-written Web site called sexetc.org. She said they reflect "the sad state of sex education in our country."

"Sexuality is still a very taboo subject in our society," she said. "Teens tell us that they can't make decisions in the dark and that adults aren't properly preparing them to make responsible decisions."

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."

And a steep price it is. The most common STD among the teenagers in the study was HPV, the virus that causes genital warts. HPV is a leading precursor to cervical cancer. The second most prevalent was Chlamydia, an asymptomatic disease caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis. Because it is asymptomatic, the disease can go undetected for years, and lead to Pelvic Inflammatory Disease, which is a leading cause of infertility and scarring that can lead to ectopic pregnancies, which can be fatal for the woman. Now, I realize that it isn't about compassion for the folks who push abstinence only. It isn't even grounded in reality. At their very core, it is about punishment. It is about divine retribution. The people who push this lunacy are the same ones who believe that women suffer in childbirth because one woman a long time ago ate a piece of forbidden fruit. (How the hell did these morons ever get taken seriously in the first place???)

It is time for a national gut-check on the folly of abstinence only sex-education.

It. Doesn't. Work.

Not only does it not work, it causes direct harm.

There's more: "Time for a gut-check" >>

Another Agency Decimated by a Political Hack

Julie Gerberding has trashed the CDC, and spent a few billion of your dollars doing it. She took an agency that worked, that was the global gold standard 0f public health, and demoralized the staff, drove off the top talent, changed the structure of the agency so it now has a centralized command structure, and, in general, ruined it. (This is considered "success" by the Bush cabal.)

And in no department within the CDC has her ham-fisted politicized management style been more acutely felt than in the vaccine safety office. The vaccine safety office was, until 2004, led by a charismatic Taiwanese immigrant named Robert T. Chen.

Chen aggressively expanded vaccine safety measures to include a linked nationwide database of 3 percent of the country’s population that could be used to investigate possible harm from vaccines. The database was key to the 1998 discovery that a new rotavirus vaccine, produced by Wyeth Co., apparently caused a severe bowel disorder in about 1 in 10,000 infants who received it. The vaccine was withdrawn.

Chen rubbed some of his superiors the wrong way, partly because of a blunt speaking style but more fundamentally because of his willingness to put the interests of public health ahead of those of the CDC. It was a combination of personal and philosophical conflicts that led to him being removed from his job. He now works in HIV prevention at CDC. [emphasis mine]

Vaccine safety now goes through Gerberding's office, and consensus seems to be that doing so has been disastrous.

The CDC had always been independent, no matter who was in the White House. It is, after all, the nations public health service. Emphasis on PUBLIC. As in you and me. Us. Our kids, and our neighbors and our friends and our coworkers and the people who work at Costco and the Kansas City Chiefs and the cop on the beat and the bartender and the butcher and the baker. Us. The people. In the past, that is where the CDC's focus was.

And it worked.

When was the last time an epidemic swept this country?

Exactly.

Our relatively disease-free existence didn't just happen, you know. It came about because of the hard work of the public health system, led by the CDC!!! It happened because dedicated men and women have lived very focused lives, concerned only with the health and well-being of the people they serve.

Robert Davis is one of the top epidemiologists in the world, and he only lasted one year at the helm of the safety office. He couldn't abide the politics - or answering to an unqualified political hack of a scientist that Gerberding put in charge because she wanted a "Yes, Ma'am." I will let him have the last word.

“What’s really sad about it is, you had a few people with the power to eviscerate what I think most of the American public wants,” Davis said. “To me that was really, really shocking.”

There's more: "Another Agency Decimated by a Political Hack" >>