 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 When you were your teen’s age, you’d probably never heard of chlamydia. But today, it’s the nation’s most common bacterial sexually transmitted disease (STD).
And chlamydia hits teens and young adults hard. More than one out of 25 people ages 18 to 26 are infected with chlamydia, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The infection rate is slightly higher among women, according to the May issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Among regions, the South has the highest chlamydia rate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2002 chlamydia prevalence report shows Texas to be one of the top three states for prevalence of chlamydia amongst teens with a rate of 10 percent of all teens tested. “The concern with chlamydia is that a large percentage of infections, especially among women, cause no symptoms at all,” says Dr. Laura Scalfano, a specialist in adolescent medicine on the medical staff at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. “Therefore, persons can be infected for quite a while but have no idea they even have the disease. The longer the disease goes untreated, the more likely it is for other complications, such as infertility, to occur.” Among those who get chlamydia, symptoms show up for about a quarter of the women and half of the men, according to the American Social Health Association. The symptoms usually occur within weeks of exposure. Men and women may face painful urination, an abnormal discharge from the urethra or both. “Because chlamydia is the number one preventable cause of tubal infertility, it is important for any sexually active person to get screened on a regular basis,” Dr. Scalfano says. Treatment involves antibiotics, which have a high success rate. How can you reduce your child’s risk of getting chlamydia? Encourage your child to abstain from intercourse, American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines suggest, “because it is the surest way to prevent STDs.” Failing that, protected sex is the key. “The best way for sexually active people to avoid chlamydia is to practice protected sex by using a condom and maintaining mutually monogamous sexual partners,” Dr. Scalfano says.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
