University Daily Kansan / Friday, April 10, 1992
5
Many high school students risking AIDS, study shows
The Associated Press
ATLANTA — High school students in the United States are playing "Russian roulette" with AIDS, with the typical student having sex by age 16 and one in five having four or more partners, researchers said wedgeward.
The national Centers for Disease Control reported that 19 percent of U.S. high school students have had four or more sex partners; the percentage jumps to 29 percent for seniors.
Male students were more likely than females to be that sexually active, 27 percent to 12 percent. For African-American males, the figure was 60 percent, compared with 21 percent for white males.
The nationwide survey, conducted in 1990, shows that a substantial proportion of students engage in behaviors that place them at risk for HIV infection, the CDC concluded.
"The best way to explain it to kids is that it's like playing Russian roulette and not knowing how many live bullets
are in the chambers," said Lloyd Kolbe, director of the CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health. "If you pull the trigger once, it can cause you to become infected."
The CDC's 1990 survey of high school health habits is its first, but the findings are dramatically higher than in previous studies of sexual behavior. For instance, a 1970 survey of females ages 15-19 found that 29 percent had engaged in sex; by 1990, it was 54 percent. Kolbe said.
It is too early to tell if teen-age sexual behavior has changed since November, when basketball superstar Magic Johnson announced he had the AIDS virus, Kolbe said. Such studies are under way, but incomplete.
Only a moderate number of sexually active students are protecting themselves against AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, the CDC said. Of students surveyed who had engaged in sex in the three preceding months, only 45 percent reported using condoms. Among the students with four partners or more, the number was only 41 percent.
Condom use was virtually identical among African-American and white students, but dropped steadily as age increased. Fifty-one percent of sexually active ninth-graders reported using condoms, compared with just 42 percent by senior year.
Through February, 808 cases of AIDS were reported in Americans ages 13-19 and 8,402 in the 20-24 age group. But it can take 10 years for an HIV infection to develop into AIDS, and thus many infected young Americans do not yet show up in the case counts.
In addition to sex, AIDS is transmitted most frequently through sharing of drug needles; the CDC found that fewer than 2 percent of American high school students had ever injected illegal drugs.
The survey was conducted among more than 11,000 students in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The overall margin of error was about 2 percentage points.
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Palm Procession and Holy
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the episcopal church university of kansas
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842-5111
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