STD Rise

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:05 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

October 25, 2019

Anchor lead: STDs are rising alarmingly, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Syphilis is infecting more newborns than ever, new CDC data show, with other kinds of sexually transmitted infections, or STDs, also rising dramatically. Maria Trent, an adolescent medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, reviews the numbers.

Trent: We have almost 600,000 cases of gonorrhea, 1.7 million cases of chlamydia, and those are just the STDs that we report. My research has been involved in other STDs too, trichomonas vaginalis and mycoplasma genitalium as an emerging threat. I think the news is troubling. You’ve seen a real shift in how we think about access to sexual and reproductive health services, broadly. And for us to really reverse these findings we’re going to have to, as a nation, take an aggressive approach to offering services to Americans.  :31 

Trent says longstanding support for reproductive health services in the US has eroded, leading to less education, testing and treatment, and these must be restored. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.