STD Data Come as No Surprise, Area Teenagers Say

(Jane Bell - AP)

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"I didn't change the way I acted around her just because she had it," said Khadijah, 14, whose right cheek has a smiley-face sticker. She said she continued to invite the friend to her house for sleepovers.

"She was my friend," Khadijah said. "I wouldn't treat her any different."

Sobering also was the fact that Washington area public health officials were not surprised by the latest CDC findings.

"What we see on the ground on the front lines really confirms the study," said Shannon Hader, senior deputy director of the D.C. Health Department's HIV/AIDS Administration.

Hader and other public health officials said a large number of young people have unprotected sex, many with multiple partners. In a 2007 study by the D.C. public school system, 60 percent of high schoolers and 30 percent of middle schoolers reported having had intercourse. Twenty percent of the high school students said they had had sex with four or more people, and 12 percent of the middle schoolers said they had had three or more partners.

Officials said many teenagers aren't aware that birth control measures, such as the pill or the patch, don't protect against STDs.

"We got the message out about preventing pregnancy," said Molly Love, who works with teens and young adults at a nonprofit health clinic in Silver Spring. "Perhaps young women learned about birth control at the expense of using condoms. Young women don't think as much about the risk of STDs as they do the risks of getting pregnant."

Love said many clients initially visit the clinic for HIV testing only to learn that they have other, more common STDs. Many aren't aware that diseases such as gonorrhea and chlamydia often don't exhibit obvious symptoms, she said.

Khadijah's two older sisters, Christine and Christina, who attend Charles Herbert Flowers High School in Springdale, find this odd. At their school, the danger of STDs is hammered into them in sex education classes, they said, as is the advice to use protection if they choose to have sex.

"They stress it at that school," Christine, 17, said. If one of her friends got a sexually transmitted disease, she said, "I would be scared for them. . . . I know the symptoms of all of the STDs, so I would know what they were going through."

Mandy Dols, a junior at Rockville High School who wrote about the rise in STDs for her student newspaper, said the high rates reported among girls didn't shock her. "It's that whole mentality of teens being reckless and rebellious and just that people aren't as careful," she said.

The Marrow girls offered several reasons why teenagers have sex.