Saturday, April 12, 2008

Is there any conclusive study to prove that sex education of school kids reudces the incidence of HIV-AIDS

Is there any conclusive study to prove that sex education of school kids reudces the incidence of HIV-AIDS?
There is too much hype abaout the desirability of having sex education in school kids to protect them from HIV-AIDS. However, I have not found a single study on the internet that actually proves that sex education amongst school kids actually reduces the incidence of HIV -AIDS. Results of a few studies only are in the nature of baseles conclusions and conjectures. Can anyone give me referencs of studies that PROVE any causal relationship between sex education in children and the incidence of HIV-AIDS?
STDs - 3 Answers
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1 :
im not going to look for a study, youd be hard pressed to argue that increasing awareness of a preventable disease will not reduce transmission. think of some diseases they dont talk about in school. if you arent in the healthcare field, how much do you know about them and what needs to be done to prevent them? do you know as much about hiv as you do hepatitis A? how about type 2 diabetes which is an 80-90% preventable disease, that affects something like 5-10% of american adults nowadays? transmission has slowed quite a bit in the US due to increased awareness (whtehr that be from school or other educational exposure) while it is the same or increasing in places like africa where people dont know anything about it
2 :
Indeed. Although sex education has helped, it is pitiful compared to what is being done in Europe. In Lousiana, I had sex ed during the "pilot" year of the sex ed program (I believe it was 1990). It was pitiful. We could NOT mention birth control methods or "abortion" *gasp*!!! Really, what good is sex ed if you can't talk about that? I then had sex ed in Belgium in a Catholic school run by priests. These priests pulled out all the stops and told these kids what "sex" was. I still have this image in my head of the priest unwrapping a condom, and fitting it onto the anatomically correct model of a man's erect penis for us all to see. Talk about culture shock. However, it was what the government had specified in the education guidelines for us, and that is what the priests taught us!
3 :
Most of the studies won't single out one disease - like HIV which is fairly rare in the US and among the teen population. There are studies though that find that safe sex practices (ie. condoms) reduce the spread of HIV worldwide. Actually there are studies that prove the opposite is true. -- Lack of comprehensive sex ed increases the rates of STDs in teenagers. A big study just came out that looked at the last few years of sex ed in the US - a sex ed that primarily stresses abstinance and at the rates of beginning of sexual intercourse (age) and the std rates. The study found that the abstinence only education had NO effect on either of these. We know that comprehensive sex ed reduces STD rates, so if you don't have comprehensive sex ed, the rates tend to go up. One recent study found in the US that 1 in 4 girls have or have had some type of STD - this is in a country that stresses abstinence only education. If teens are not learning how to protect themselves from disease, then they are not going to be able to protect themselves. The CDC has a lot of information about safe sex and statistics - I highly recommend that you search through their website. In addition, I use a library database (maybe with help from the librarian) that can search through medical journal articles for information - try searching for STD education in western europe -they provide a lot of sex ed and have fairly low STD rates

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