Wasn't Sex Infection the feel good techno club hit of 1985?

"Sex infections"? I've never even heard that term before. It makes me think of a sixth-grader trying to remember what STDs/STIs are called.

I agree. Maybe getting the numbers of teen boys is more difficult because they don't often receive reproductive exams, but still. Make an effort to balance reporting.

And the headline is great. They are sexually transmitted diseases, they are "sex infections" ewww! (sarcasm)

Silly Samhita, clearly there has also been an outbreak of lesbianism. I didn't read the article, of course, but that's obviously what we're meant to infer from the headline. Boys are blameless creatures.
*end sarcasm*

I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the statistic was the same for college aged men. (I could be making that up but I remembered reading that somewhere).

Regardless, the issue isn't how many and what disease. The issue to me is how do we stop the spread of infection when realistic remedies and prevention is available?

There is no reason in a country as wealthy as ours that teens can't have access to STD preventatives.

I do have to chuckle at the fact that we had free condoms no questions asked at my CATHOLIC high school. Our school priest looked the other way and our nurse let it be known that you could come to her, no questions asked and talk or figure out if you needed treatment. And she kept her word and changed several kids' (that I know of) lives at my school.

Better prevention and care than my friends at the public school down the street got!

Clearly, teenage girls are spontaneously breaking out with STD's on their own because everyone knows the boys aren't giving it to them. Glad the NYTimes cold clear that up for us. Now could somebody please explain how women are also raping themselves?

Clearly, teenage girls are spontaneously breaking out with STD's on their own because everyone knows the boys aren't giving it to them. Glad the NYTimes could clear that up for us. Now could somebody please explain how women are also raping themselves?

I too am puzzled by that title on a grammatical level.

"Sex" is a verb meaning intercourse, or it is a noun signifying the physical gender of an individual.

"Infection" is a noun to describe the act of infecting or the physical properties of the virus that infects.

Last I checked, a noun cannot modify a verb, but it can be used as an adjective to modify another noun. You cannot use an adjective to modify a verb: that would require an adverb (ends in -ly ... see Johnny Dangerously).

So it would seem that the term infection here is used as an adjective to modify... a noun. So are they saying that the state of being a female is necessarily a diseased state for 1 in 4 women?

That headline is strange; especially since it would be appropriate to use "STIs" or "STDs" as those are in such common usage.

This is one of the few times I disagree with the majority here.
Yes, every girl and her mother has HPV. 1. Dudes actually *can’t* be tested for most of the strains (like the ones that cause cancer). 2. Condoms don’t do much to protect against many of the strains. These are but two reasons most sexually active ladies have at least a couple types of HPV. Because of the nature of the virus, I also think it makes sense to refer to it as an ‘infection’ and not a ‘disease’. It’s a virus. One that causes legions on the cervix. Sounds like an infection, no?

The deal with HPV is it’s (as my feminist GYN explained) basically irrelevant: Almost everyone’s got it and you’re probably going to get it if you have sex. As someone who had to have almost half her cervix taken off for pre-cancerous legions due to HPV and only a year of pap-neglect at 25 years old, I think this is a responsible title—not ‘slut-shaming’. Girls need to be made aware that HPV is prevalent, and it doesn’t matter if you have it or not: just assume you do and go get regular paps.

Sex infection? I've never heard that phrase before either. How is it possible that a person can be "infected with sex"?

I also don't understand the singling out of teenage girls. Where do they think these girls are getting these STD's from? To me it seems like they are implying:
"teenage girls with STDs = slut, dirty, unclean etc."
and
"teenage boys with STDs = oh that's okay, you're not really responsible anyways, it's those slutty, dirty, girls' fault"

Of course this is coming from a newspaper - you know, given their record as of late. Ugh.

You DO realize how stupid an argument it is, and how circular, to ask "Where are young women getting these infections? They must be getting them from young men! BAD MEN!"

I could easily say "Well, where did those young men get them from? They must have gotten them from young women! BAD WOMEN!"

It's a ridiculous point to address, and only creates a circle. It's not even relevant, because you can't blame men for women having the diseases, unless you blame women for men having them. It goes nowhere.

If they had an article that said "1/2 of men are (something negative)", would you attack it as biased and sexist, and demand to see the statistics showing how (something negative) women are, too?

Not all studies have to have both genders included to be relevant.

"sex infections" is just unclear and confusing.

What I find more sexist in the headline though is the way girls are reduced to objects in which sex infections are found.

I can see how one finds an infection in a monkey, or finds a body in a dumpster, but finding something in a teenage girl makes it sound like the girl is unconscious, or dead, or non-human.

Mild Ennui made the point I stopped in to make... so I'll just "Me too" his post.

but finding something in a teenage girl makes it sound like the girl is unconscious, or dead, or non-human.

Uh...what? How would you have them phrase it, when they're referring to finding them in teenage girls?

There are two reasons why the study being done only on girls (and reported in the way it was reported) is disturbing:

(1) the slut shaming aspect of it (reinforced by the title "sex infections" rather than STI ... the new preferred term because, as pointed out above, you might not have a disease even if you are infected) ...

(2) maybe I'm leaning too much on my own personal experience here but in my experience most boys 19 or younger are not getting any and hence cannot have an STI ... it is fair to ask who is spreading infections to girls and under what circumstances. I know the girls involved with older men (and the men themselves) will utter some b.s. about girls maturing earlier, but is that really true?

Perhaps, because we aren't looking at both boys and girls (even if we are doing so for simply methodological reasons, c.f. ivavendetta above), we might be missing a bigger story here.

I believe the CBS News report last night said 50% of teenage girls has STDs, which made me wonder how that matched with their much lower percentages infected by individual diseases. It may have been wrong, but it was much more attention grabbing, and isn't that was tV news is all about these days?

(2) maybe I'm leaning too much on my own personal experience here but in my experience most boys 19 or younger are not getting any and hence cannot have an STI ... it is fair to ask who is spreading infections to girls and under what circumstances.
You're leaning far too much on personal experience. I don't have any statistics, but where I live it's extremely rare to be male and a virgin at 19 or older. I'm really not sure why you would think the young girls are sexually active and not the young guys.

Mild Ennui,
I think knowing how many boys have STI (while acknowledging that they cannot be tested for all STIs) would provide more information. For instance, wouldn't it be interesting to find out that 50% of teenage girls have an STI and only 2% of teenage boys? (Not saying this is the case, just saying that knowing the percentage of teen boys that have an STI would create a more complete picture.) So yeah, I think it's totally relevant to want to know what percentage of teenage boys are infected.

The reason that only girls are addressed in the study is because the majority of those STIs (18% of the 25% if I remember correctly) are HPV infections, which cannot be tested in men.

So the people doing the study have no choice but to focus on girls. Why there is no test for men however is a more troublesome question... and according the thehpvtest.com:

"the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises men that they don’t need to be worried about the lack of an HPV test for them. The agency states that "there is no clear health benefit to knowing if men have this virus, since HPV is unlikely to affect their health and cannot be treated. For most men, there would be no need to treat HPV, even if treatment were available, since it usually goes away on its own.""

right... because men clearly wouldn't want to know if they have an infection they could pass on to their sexual partner...

>Mild Ennui,

You're missing the point, which is that there should be equal coverage of the statistics for young men, or at least a mention or explanation of why those figures aren't available. It's not a question of blame. It's a question of implication by omission - if the stats for men aren't discussed, that suggests that young women's STIs exist in a vacuum and it's not a problem at all for young men.

(Epidemiologists can't look at disease transmission in just half of a population, they have to look at the whole population. Can you imagine studying influenza only in the very young and then declaring or implying that it's only a problem if you're under the age of 2?)

> everyone,

Blame? Why are we still treating this like a moral issue? It's a public health issue, first and foremost.

To pretend that it isn't slut shaming is to pretend that we do not live in an anti-sex culture... but we do.

Not testing or writing about STIs in boys (and again, with feeling, HPV is transmitted non-sexually too) indicates that our culture only cares if the women have sex - which is true.

Whether the burden of disease is higher for women or not, the means of transmission often involves men. Thus, the CDC and the article are indeed sexist. Sorry mild ennui, that is the situation.

Good to know the CDC is looking out for the whole population. "There is no clear health benefit to knowing if men have this virus, since HPV is unlikely to affect their health and cannot be treated." Well that settles that. If men can't be treated for a disease they transmit to their partners, why bother including them in studies that might curb the transmission? While we're at it, let's cut out the middle man when studying Malaria and just blame the fools that don't use bug spray.

"'Sex infections'? I've never even heard that term before. It makes me think of a sixth-grader trying to remember what STDs/STIs are called."

"That headline is strange; especially since it would be appropriate to use 'STIs' or 'STDs' as those are in such common usage."

I agree.

Back in the day tons of things were worse but at least the NYTimes wasn't as picky about keeping headlines short...

"THE WORST STORM THE CITY HAS EVER KNOWN. BUSINESS AND TRAVEL COMPLETELY SUSPENDED. NEW-YORK HELPLESS IN A TORNADO OF WIND AND SNOW WHICH PARALYZED ALL INDUSTRY, ISOLATED THE CITY FROM THE REST OF THE COUNTRY, CAUSED MANY ACCIDENTS AND GREAT DISCOMFORT, AND EXPOSED IT TO MANY DANGERS." - March 12, 1888.

"Because of the nature of the virus, I also think it makes sense to refer to it as an ‘infection’ and not a ‘disease’. It’s a virus. One that causes legions on the cervix. Sounds like an infection, no?"

Yeah, that makes sense. Using the term STI instead of "sex infection" would have made the headline clearer.

"I know the girls involved with older men (and the men themselves) will utter some b.s. about girls maturing earlier, but is that really true?"

IRL we only "mature earlier" physically. I was fertile in 6th grade, and I'm happy my parents didn't say "you're a woman now!!!" and try to "help" me get a man...

"Using the term STI instead of "sex infection" would have made the headline clearer."

I disagree. I suspect most people don't know what "STI" stands for. I'd never heard the term until a couple of years ago, and only see now in context of fairly technical context or STD pamphlets put together by medical professionals. I think the weird "sex infection" language in the headline is an attempt to keep the headline short ("sexually transmitted infection" is considerably longer) and an editorial policy of not using acronyms in headlines.

"Not testing or writing about STIs in boys indicates that our culture only cares if the women have sex - which is true."

I strenuously disagree. Remember that there is no HPV test for men or boys. You could not do this study in men even if you wanted to.

Also remember that all the press around this issue are press reports on a scientific study that, as far as I can find online, hasn't been published yet. Scientific studies are normally highly targeted. This study looked only at females in a certain age range using a particlar database and it's the first of its kind. I don't think that's unusual. It's not because the study's authors only care about women having sex, it's just the nature of how science is done.

You know, maybe it's just because I'm a microbiologist, but I really think the semantics over "infection" vs. "disease" are just plain silly. They're often two sides of the same coin. In fact, you can't have an infection without being diseased (at least temporarily).

A disease, simply put, it a deviation from the healthy state. A lesion is a symptom of a disease. An infection results in disease (sometimes temporary, sometimes not). Not all diseases are caused by infections though (ex. genetic disorders). But to think the word "disease" is somehow less PC than "infection" makes me giggle.

My guess would be that the reason STI is a more acceptable term these days is because 1) people don't understand that a diseased state can be temporary, so the term STD conjures up all kinds of overwrought fears for the curable sexually transmitted conditions, and 2) there is a lot of stigma attached to the word "disease".

That said...what the hell are "sex infections"? I mean, if a viral infection means you've been infected by a virus, and a bacterial infection means you've been infected with bacteria...I suppose a sex infection would mean you've been infected with sex. Man, I've been living on this Earth for 22 years and I never knew that sex was literally infectious. I mean shit, how exactly is sex transmitted? Is it caused by a parasite, virus, bacterium, fungus, or prion? The people need to know!

"I think the weird 'sex infection' language in the headline is an attempt to keep the headline short"

Now that you mention why they wouldn't use STIs, I get how it's an attempt at brevity.

"I strenuously disagree. Remember that there is no HPV test for men or boys. You could not do this study in men even if you wanted to."

The study wasn't only looking at HPV and there are tests for other STDs and STIs in men and boys, right?

You could do this study in men too as long as you add an explanation of why you tested men for 1 fewer STIs than you tested women for...

Mina,

That's just my guess. I still think it was a poor choice of words.

I imagine the study's authors went into the study knowing HPV was going to be the most prevalent STI by far. If you can study that in one population but not the other, it makes sense to me to study it where you can.

If they had done the study in only boys, I wonder if people would be criticizing them for neglecting the health care of women, especially because you can test for the most prevalent STI in them. :)

It's not like there won't be more studies in the future.

other things "infected" brings to mind:

zombies

News flash for Narc: science is *gasp* influenced by culture. And there are some numbers for men, because Merck's phase I and phase II clinical trials (you know, science) tested safety and immunogenicity of Gardasil in males. You can't test immonogenicity without testing for the virus.

From the CDC report:

HPV infection also is common among men (63--67). Among heterosexual men in clinic-based studies, prevalence of genital HPV infection often is >20% and is highly dependent on the anatomic sites sampled and method of specimen collection (64,66,67).
Clinical Sequelae of HPV Infection

It's headlined "US Teens..." here, with mention of gender only in the article.

I just love the double entendre. Found IN teenage girls. Get it? Har har.

I hate you, New York Times.

The televeision news shows have picked it up the same way, focusing only on the girls. It was pissing me off yesterday morning as I sat in a hotel lobby waiting for my coworker.

Mighty Ponygirl, sex isn't a verb. Unless you say "I'm gonna sex you up" or something. Sex and intercourse are both nouns. It's a noun modifying another noun, or a compound - infections that have something to do with sex. Which they are. It is an unusual way to say it, but I don't see how it's especially slut-shaming. It gives the same information as "1/4 of teenage girls have STIs" just with different syntax. STI stands for SEXually transmitted INFECTION, after all. If they didn't want to use acronyms, "sex infection" would be a shortening of that phrase that is still understandable, if odd because it's never used. Somehow, I think saying they've been found in girls rather than that girls have them is slightly less slut-shaming, although I sincerely hope that double entendre on "in" wasn't intended. But I agree that it's weird to focus only on girls.

I thought it was a strange way to write a headline when I saw it, too. Today, however, there is an article on STDs in gay men entitled
"Sex Diseases in Many Gay Men Go Unfound, Experts Say"

Come on now. I am just as progressive as the next woman, probably more so, but I have trouble seeing why this article has drawn so much flak from this site. I have read it twice now. Do readers/editors/whoever think the word "disease" is preferable to "infection." We are talking about sexually transmitted diseases here. To me, this article was clearly aimed at raising awareness & alerting young women and the community at large that we have a very serious issue here, largely attributable to abstinence only education, among other things. I did not find any indication in the article that the high prevanlence of STDs among young women was due to promiscuous behavior or any fault of the young women themselves. Would you rather this issue was kept in the dark? The New York Times chose to put it up front and center, and rightfully so.

I wonder if the study is supposed to scare parents into vaccinating their teen girls? There has been mega- marketing of the new HPV vaccine (which may be related to why this study only focuses on females).

From the article: "It is also the first time the study measured human papillomavirus."

adminassistant,
Can you provide a link or information about where you found this quote: "There is no clear health benefit to knowing if men have this virus, since HPV is unlikely to affect their health and cannot be treated."

I have searched the CDC site with no luck. Thanks.

Sadge,
I was quoting a post from speef who was quoting thehpvtest.com At http://www.cdc.gov/std/hpv/STDFact-HPV-and-men.htm
you'll find most of the same information. "Currently, there is no test designed to find HPV in men. But HPV is very common and most men with HPV will never develop health problems from it."

"News flash for Narc: science is *gasp* influenced by culture."

I never said it wasn't. But sometimes there is a reasonable and practical reason for doing something someway that isn't part of a patriarchal attempt to oppress women.

"And there are some numbers for men, because Merck's phase I and phase II clinical trials (you know, science) tested safety and immunogenicity of Gardasil in males. You can't test immonogenicity without testing for the virus."

OK, you can test for HPV in men, in some ways in a scientific context. It is often inconclusive.
There isn't, however, one approved by the FDA, i.e. in a medical context, nor is there such a test commercially available.

Furthermore, you can test for immunogenicity without a test for the virus. HPV (some strains) cause penile warts in men. These are visible and could be detected and reported in the Gardasil clinical studies by self-inspection and reporting or some other method. If men that got Gardasil contracted and developed warts at a lower rate than men that did not get Gardasil, that would pretty much show the vaccine prevents the HPV infection that causes the warts without being able to actually test for HPV.

"Mighty Ponygirl, sex isn't a verb. Unless you say 'I'm gonna sex you up' or something."

Here's the 'or something.' :)

http://cgee.hamline.edu/frogs/science/faq1.html#anatomy

"...4. How do I tell the sex of my frog or toad?

"Sexing frogs depends on the species. There are a number of tropical species that are dimorphic in regards to color, with the males being more colorful than females. In Minnesota, Bullfrogs and Green Frog males have larger eardrums than females. In some species males will have enlarged thumbs. Most good field guides will provide descriptions of the differences.

"Under certain conditions, some frogs can change their sex! Check it out:
http://newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99128.htm..."

Haha, thanks Mina, good to know. Turns out Wikipedia has a page on Chick Sexing. Just a bad joke waiting to happen.

See adminassistant, most WOMEN with HPV will never develop health problems from it, either. The cervical cancer rate is around 10 per 100,000 women for all races.
(for race specific info, go here http://www.cdc.gov/omh/Highlights/2005/HJan05.htm)
That's around 0.01%, several orders of magnitude lower than the HPV infection rate!
Given that the men and women who *do* develop health problems develop potentially deadly cancers, I think there is need for tests and vaccines for both women and men.

Funny, you know, I saw the headline, registered the numbers and moved on. Hadn't it been for your post, I would not have reacted to the unfair and skewed coverage. I have fought this in other areas, but here, maybe because it was about teen-agers (and I am long past that age), I did not see the obvious misogyny...
I am like a hawk when it comes to the Catholic Church and here I missed it.
So thank you for raising my consciousness.
And where should we go to see a similar studies on male teenagers?