STD Awareness Month and Our Youth Obsession
This year, the CDC, Planned Parenthood, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and others are sponsoring a great STD awareness campaign by MTV to encourage young people to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases. It’s called Get Yourself Tested or GYT and it’s a terrific campaign for National STD Awareness Month.
However, this campaign points to one inherent problem in our efforts to bring STD Awareness to the country – it targets the youth market and ignores trending disease rates in older age groups. STDs do not disproportionally affect young people but marketing campaigns would make us believe that’s so.
While it is certainly critical to teach young people how to protect themselves, this important public health awareness effort needs to be broader in scope. The facts show that, according to the CDC, the highest number of newly acquired cases of HIV/AIDS have been found in middle-aged adults, ranging in age from 35 to 44. Following closely behind is the group aged 45 to 54 with the least affected age group being the young people – those aged 25 to 34.
Why might this be?
In a University of Chicago survey of single women ages 58 to 93, nearly 60% said they didn’t use a condom the last time they had sex. A May 2008 study conducted by the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene showed that among single people with at least two sexual partners, 56% of people over age 45 reported using condoms the last time they had sex, compared with 61% of 25-to-44-year-olds and 80% of 18-to-24-year-olds.
Even though the older, and assumed wiser, adults are not the focus of major sexual health awareness efforts, they are the ones taking the most risk. The new faces of HIV/AIDS and other STDs are not just gay men, the sexually promiscuous or intravenous drug users, it’s the woman over 50 who doesn’t use condoms because she’s not worried about getting pregnant. Or even the 42-year-old divorced dad who’s back on the dating scene again after many years and doesn’t know how to bring up the topic of using condoms or regular STD testing.
Viagra, Facebook, online dating, increased rates of midlife divorce, and a lack of awareness may all be contributing forces here. However, the reality is that STDs are no longer just an affliction of the young.
As grownups, it’s important for us not to follow the “do as I say, not as I do” mantra. STDs and their impacts are not taboo anymore, they are an important part of our regular health as adults.
So this STD Awareness Month, make sure you get the message. It’s important for people of all ages to hear it. STDs and HIV are preventable. Use condoms every time you have sexual contact. Be sure to get STD tested and make smart decisions about your sexual health, like talking to your partner about testing.
Talking about STDs and getting tested is something we just don’t talk about with our friends and family. We wish we could change this part of our culture. Even in a modern, enlightened society, we just don’t talk about sexual health. That’s unfortunate and contributes to a massive public health problem. If we talked about STDs in an open and honest way, we could make great strides in screening and treating sexually transmitted infections and disease. STD Awareness month is a great way to start to re-think this part of our health. Let’s think about getting tested for STDs the way we think about recycling, eating organic food, staying fit, and all of the other things we do to make our bodies healthy and the world a healthier place.
Guest Post by:
By Michelle Sobel, co-founder of STDTestExpress.com and sexual health blogger on Unzipped, STD Test Express,
Blog Note: No payment or compensation or products were provided for the post.