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Justin Timberlake may think he brought “Sexyback,” but sexy never left the college campus.

Whether you’re in the classic make-grandma-happy relationship or had a casual romp after a night at the Street, it is not hard to believe that many Princetonians are sexually active. So how effectively is University Health Services (UHS) aiding those students in making critical decisions, dealing with unplanned consequences and properly maintaining their sexual health?

According to a survey done by Trojan, at least, the University is doing a pretty good job. In 2005, out of 100 different private and public schools, Princeton ranked sixth with a 3.4 GPA on its “Sexual Health” report card. Yale topped the list, while Stanford ranked fourth and Duke eighth.

Trojan gave a letter grade to every school in the following categories: condom advice and availability, HIV and STI testing, sexual assault counseling and services, contraception advice and availability, advice column or Q-and-A feature for sexual issues or relationships; counseling service, peer counseling, campus events, and other outreach. Princeton received an “A” in every category except two “C”s in HIV and STI testing and the advice column section.

The most common STIs on college campuses are genital warts, chlamydia and herpes. UHS treats genital warts most often, according to the website of women’s and men’s health services. This STI is spread through skin-to-skin contact, but 80 percent of women and men show no traceable signs, according to UHS. The infection is caused by certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV). The warts can be removed by topical creams or gels prescribed by a doctor, freezing them with cryotherapy or using an acidic chemical.

When the vaccine for a different HPV, the one that causes cervical cancer, hit the market for consumer use in June 2006 after gaining approval from the FDA, UHS embraced the medical marvel, and the vaccination is currently available to students. While some insurance companies are considering covering the vaccination, the Student Health Plan currently does not cover the $402 treatment, which is administered in three shots over the course of six months.

Despite the cost, students are generally supportive of UHS offering the new HPV vaccine. “If you are sexually active, then I think you should get it,” said Paige Floyd ‘10. The vaccine has been recommended for girls between the ages of 11 and 26. “It’s a good thing for people to be aware of, even if they aren’t sexually active,” added Karen Jeng ‘08.

By: Naomi Nix

Our sex education system, at this moment, doesn’t cut it.
But it’s not for want of trying. For there are many people working hard to improve what we teach young people about sex in school across this country.
And what the educational curriculum is meant to provide is important stuff: information about puberty, STDs, birth control, feelings, etc., etc. According to the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN), over two-thirds of Canadians have sexual intercourse before they’re 20.
So it makes sense that schools are the place where standardized sexual health information is taught — the one place all kids pass to adulthood. But the problem seems to be the current goals for sex education are not realistic. Why?
A document prepared last year by the information council called Sexual Health Education In The schools: Questions & Answers, gives some answers.
“Despite declines in the teen pregnancy rate, close to 40,000 teens become pregnant each year and most of these pregnancies are unintended,” it says. “Sexually transmitted infection rates among Canadian teens are unacceptably high and have been rising.”
In fact, chlamydia rates climbed 41.9 per cent between 1997 and 2002 among 15- to 19-year-old females.
So though sex education in schools is essential, it’s not getting the job done.
Ann Barrett, sex educator with Toronto Public Health for 15 years, says the sex education’s aim is multifaceted. The hope is students will have the basic knowledge and skills to deal with sexuality by grades 9 or 10 when some are likely to find themselves in harm’s way.
“The ideal thing would be, and this is assuming that each year it gets taught by a teacher who is knowledgeable and comfortable with it, we would hope that they (students) feel comfortable being able to deal with sexual health topics,” says Barrett. The Catholic school board incorporates sexual education into one of five themes within a Family Life curriculum: personhood, relationships, sexuality, living in commitment and living in the world.
“We try to give them the skills on how to make a good moral decision,” says Ralph Peter, with the Toronto Catholic board’s Religious Education and Family Life Department. Is it working?
“I would say that we provide them with the foundations for that,” Peter says.
Problem is “the foundations” are usually all there is time for.
“Let’s look at the reality,” says Barrett. “If we’re looking at the school as a source of sexual health information, a student will get anywhere from maybe three to five hours in a year. … The amount of time that goes into the sexual education, we wouldn’t expect anyone to come out with everything they need .”
But our kids these days are living in a sexually saturated world, and it takes a little bit more than three hours to help kids sort through all the messages they receive about sex.
Still sex educators aren’t kidding themselves — they know what they’re up against.
“There’s just too much stuff in the curriculum,” says Barrett. “A teacher simply can’t accomplish all of it.”
The time allotted isn’t the only issue.
Some teachers just aren’t comfortable teaching what’s asked of them.
Stephanie Mitelman is a certified sex educator based in Montreal. She’ll be in Toronto next Friday delivering a training workshop called “Understanding Adolescent Sexuality and Teaching Sex Ed” as part of a cross-country tour with her teen sexuality initiative Sexpressions.
“Unfortunately there’s not enough money funnelled into this area,” Mitelman says. “I think there are a lot of teachers who do a wonderful job at sex ed. But a lot would benefit from additional training and resources.”
With all of the talk about abstinence-only sex ed flowing up from the States, and the constant concerns over budget cuts here at home, the chance that more funding will go to sex ed isn’t good. It then falls to family and other community members to fill in the sexual-information gap and Mitelman agrees.
It makes sense to scrutinize the sex education our children are getting at school. But let’s not forget about the ongoing sex ed they should be getting from the other adults in their lives.
by: MEGAN MCCHESNEY

FAST-track testing and treatment for sexual diseases is to be introduced across north Manchester.
A £500,000 cash boost and new testing technology will see patients with concerns about their sexual health dealt with in less than 48 hours.
The rapid treatment will become available to patients across Bury, Heywood, Middleton, Oldham and Rochdale in the New Year, thanks to a centralised booking system for four clinics and new testing procedures.

The UK government has spent £4million on an advertising campaign to encourage young people to carry condoms on a night out. Using pictures of men wearing underpants that read ‘I’ve got chlamydia’, and other such unsavoury images, the campaign’s aim, according to public health minister Caroline Flint, is to make ‘carrying and using a condom’ among 18- 24-year-olds ‘as familiar as carrying a mobile phone, lipstick or putting on a seat-belt’.
Well, isn’t that nice? Another few million pounds of taxpayers’ money (apparently a further £46million has been pledged to the campaign over the next two years) spent on another tawdry and fruitless campaign encouraging teenagers to treat their sexual activities with the same degree of thought and planning as the university admissions process.
Flint points out that ‘some STIs [sexually transmitted infections] like chlamydia are on the increase among 18- to 24-year-olds and it is vital that we deliver strong messages about using condoms to prevent them’. But what is the deal with chlamydia, and what exactly are the government’s ‘strong messages’ trying to say?
Chlamydia is an unpleasant, often symptomless little disease that people can carry without knowing it, and it can be transmitted through sexual intercourse. It is easily treated through a course of antibiotics. Many argue that, if left untreated, chlamydia can lead to fertility problems for women in later life – although this effect is often exaggerated, and some, such as the fertility expert Lord Robert Winston, have disputed this link altogether. Chlamydia may well be on the increase among young people, but it is hard to know how much of this is due to increased awareness of the disease, through countless government-sponsored chlamydia-awareness campaigns, and the fact that there has been a national screening programme for chlamydia in place for the past few years.
There’s nothing about chlamydia itself that makes it a public health menace. But the symbolism of chlamydia as a public health message has grown year by year.
Over the past few years there have been numerous public health campaigns seeking to achieve what the Great AIDS Panic did in the late Eighties, and popularise the notion that Casual Sex Kills. Young people soon got wise to the fact that AIDS was not going to strike down British-born heterosexual teenagers, and as the predicted epidemic failed to materialise health authorities found that they could no longer make use of those attractive tombstone leaflets and other dire warnings of doom. So they focused on chlamydia instead – something that doesn’t kill you but might, just might, make you infertile if you’re a woman and fail to use a condom, and can spread silently, without your knowledge. It’s classic disease-as-metaphor stuff – chlamydia being the metaphor for the risks of casual sex, and condoms being the metaphor for how you protect yourself against those risks.
But in boosting the metaphorical cache of chlamydia and condoms, government campaigns subvert certain realities. For example, as Ann Furedi, chief executive of the abortion and advice service bpas has pointed out, as a form of contraception condoms are relatively unreliable, and promoting the use of condoms could possibly lead to a rise in unwanted pregnancies. ‘Historically, whenever there has been a shift away from hormonal contraception like the pill, towards barrier methods like condoms, rates of unplanned pregnancy have risen as a result’, says Furedi.
Unwanted pregnancy is a more immediate problem for young women than chlamydia – it isn’t symptomless, you cannot ignore it for longer than nine months, and dealing with an unwanted pregnancy is a much bigger deal than getting treatment for a bog-standard sexually transmitted infection. In this respect, condoms are not necessarily the responsible choice – and for the government to promote this form of contraception over all others is in many ways quite irresponsible.
Does this bother the health authorities? No. Because this is not a real health campaign so much as a symbolic moral campaign. And from AIDS onwards, condoms have suited the moralism of governments much better than effective contraceptive methods like the pill. The pill retains its aura of sexual liberation, of being ready for the moment – you take it every day so that a spontaneous sexual encounter will not be a problem. Condoms, on the other hand, might sometimes be rubbish at stopping pregnancies but they are a great symbol of the need to Think Before You Act – taking them with you on a night out, stopping mid-fumble to put them on.
Furthermore, the category of ‘barrier contraceptive’ sums up the attraction of the condom for our risk-averse times. A condom is a barrier between you and your sexual partner, symbolising your suspicion that the person sharing your bed is about to infect you or somehow hurt you. If your sexual partner is not wearing underpants reading ‘I’ve got chlamydia’, the condom assumes that the message is there.
When the government talks about popularising ‘strong messages’ to prevent diseases like chlamydia, the message it is promoting is not awareness of chlamydia, but fear of intimate relationships with other people. There is a shoulder-shrugging recognition that young people today sleep around, and while nobody in authority these days has the bottle to say that casual sex is wrong, nor can they accept that casual sex is all right. So they bombard young people with grotty little ad campaigns and insidious warnings of disease and danger, in the vague hope that when people do get laid they will do it with the requisite amount of doubt and guilt.
‘Improving the nation’s sexual health is a key government priority’, says Caroline Flint. Fine, when it means access to sexual health services to treat problems like chlamydia or an unwanted pregnancy. But when a significant part of ‘improving the nation’s sexual health’ means official warnings about what might be in our partner’s underpants, we should get our knickers in a twist.

By: Jennie Bristow

Combating Rise in Sexually Transmitted Infections

A hard-hitting new sexual health campaign will urge sexually active young adults to make condoms essential wear when they are out on the “pull.”

Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) such as chlamydia are spreading fast among 18 to 24 year olds. However, while 90 per cent of girls and 70 per cent of boys own a pair of special “pulling pants” for when they hit the town, fewer than 20 per cent carry a condom which means more than 80 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds are putting themselves at risk of an STI.

Television, magazine and radio ads alongside on-line advertising will specifically target young men and women who are most at risk of infection. The TV ad shows couples getting together in scenarios where the name of an Sexually transmitted infection is clearly displayed on their clothing or jewellery, highlighting the stark reality that these infections are not easy to spot. Images used in the magazines and on-line advertising continue this theme, while radio adverts focus on the physical consequences of catching an STI.

Launching the campaign Public Health Minister Caroline Flint said:

“Improving the nation’s sexual health is a key Government priority and improving access times to sexual health clinics, chlamydia screening and this campaign will all help to drive down the number of cases of Sexually transmitted infections.

“Some STIs like chlamydia are on the increase amongst 18 to 24 year-olds and it is vital that we deliver strong messages about using condoms to prevent them. The aim of this campaign is to make carrying and using a condom among this age group as familiar as carrying a mobile phone, lipstick or putting on a seat-belt. This is not about encouraging promiscuity, but saying to those who are already sexually active: sex without a condom is seriously risky, so always use one.

“The message of this campaign is that you can’t tell just by looking whether someone has an STI. Some infections often have no noticeable symptoms and others cannot be cured, so taking responsibility for your own sexual health should always be your key priority.”

Baroness Gould, Chair of the Independent Advisory Group on Sexual Health and HIV, said:

“The IAG on Sexual Health and HIV welcomes the Government’s commitment to helping improve young people’s sexual health. This campaign is absolutely necessary in tackling the increasing rate of STIs. On-going health promotion is a vital tool in increasing awareness, understanding and, ultimately, prevention of STIs.”

Anne Weyman, Chief Executive of the Family Planning Association, said:

“Using a condom is a very normal and completely essential part of any sexual relationship. The benefits of empowering young people - through this campaign - not only to know this fact but to act on it cannot be overestimated. Sustaining the campaign so it can make the biggest impact possible over the longest period of time will be key to its success.”

The new TV advert will be on air from 20 November. It will be screened on satellite channels, Channel 4 and Channel 5. Magazine adverts will appear in key titles for the 18 to 24 year old market. Radio and on-line advertising will run from the 27th November. The campaign is initially scheduled to run for the pre-Christmas and Valentines periods - times of the year where rates of STI contraction are traditionally higher.

The new £4 million campaign is part of a wider Government initiative to improve sexual health and tackle teenage pregnancy. It complements the existing campaigns, ‘R U Thinking?’ which is aimed at the under 16s, and ‘Want Respect? Use a condom’, aimed at 16 to 18 year old socially excluded teenagers. Both are delivered by the Department for Education and Skills.

The Department of Health is also involved in on-going work with stakeholder groups to increase the availability of condoms to those most at risk of having unprotected sex.

The new adult sexual health campaign is part of DH’s Sexual Health and HIV Strategy, which is a long-term plan to improve and modernise sexual health services. The strategy includes, rollout of chlamydia screening for the under 25s, 48hr access to GU clinics, the development of service standards and in improving access to contraception.

By: Department of Health UK

One fifth (20 per cent) of women aged 16-49 had undergone a test for Chlamydia at some point in the past, of whom 27 per cent had done so in the previous year, according to a new report published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Awareness of Chlamydia is increasing. The proportion of people who recognised that it is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) has increased sharply since the question was first asked in the 2000/01 survey – from 35 per cent to 79 per cent of men and from 65 per cent to 91 per cent for women.

Young women were most likely to have had a test for Chlamydia (31 per cent of 16-29 year-olds had been tested in the past compared with 20 per cent of 30-39 year olds and 11 per cent of 40-49 year olds.).

Women who had had more than one sexual partner in the past year were also more likely to have had a test (43 per cent compared with 20 per cent of those who had had just one partner).

Those who knew Chlamydia was an STI were asked five questions about the symptoms. Women were twice as likely as men to give correct responses to all questions (38 per cent compared to 18 per cent).

This report presents the results of a survey on contraception and sexual health carried out by the ONS in 2005/06 on behalf of the Information Centre for health and social care. Questions were addressed to women aged 16-49 and men aged 16-69.

Contraceptive use in women aged under 50

The majority (74 per cent) of women aged under 50 were using contraception. The most popular method was the contraceptive pill (24 per cent) followed by the male condom (21 per cent) - both methods were more popular among younger women.

Ten per cent of women under 50 had been sterilised (18 per cent of men under 70 had undergone a vasectomy). Sterilisation was more common among women with no qualifications than among those with qualifications.

Twenty-six per cent of women under 50 were not currently using a method of contraception (14 per cent were not in a sexual relationship with someone of the opposite sex).

Among women in a heterosexual relationship, the main reason that women did not use contraception was because their partner had been sterilised (55 per cent). The next most common reason was actual or planned pregnancy (21 per cent).

Emergency contraception

Condom failure was most common reason why hormonal emergency contraception (the morning after pill) was used (45 per cent) followed by forgetting to take the oral contraceptive pill (22 per cent).

Five per cent of women had used emergency hormonal contraception in the year before interview. Of these women, 45 per cent had obtained it directly from a chemist or pharmacy, 30 per cent from their own GP or practice nurse and 24 per cent from a family planning clinic.

Condom use

Forty-one per cent of men and 46 per cent of women said they had used a condom in the previous year. Condom use was most common among men who had had more than one sexual partner in the past year and among those with degree level qualifications.

Ninety per cent of women who used a condom said the reason was to prevent pregnancy and 43 per cent cited preventing infection, compared with 88 per cent and 47 per cent of men respectively. (People could give more than one reason).

Sexual behaviour

Sixteen per cent of men aged under 70 had had no sexual partners in the previous year, 73 per cent had had just one partner and 12 per cent had had more than one.

Twelve per cent of women aged under 50 had had no sexual partners in the previous year, 81 per cent had had just one partner and seven per cent had had more than one.

Knowledge of sexually transmitted infections Just over half of men and women reported making no changes to their behaviour as a result of what they had heard about HIV/AIDS and other STIs. However, 37 per cent said they had increased their use of condoms, nine per cent had fewer one night stands and three per cent had a test for STIs.

Television programmes were the most commonly mentioned source of information about STIs (32 per cent), followed by television advertisements (21 per cent) and newspapers, magazines or books (21 per cent).