True love waits. Teens hear that message of abstinence more and more today. To drive it home, parents and teachers often emphasize the scariest potential consequences of sexual activity -- pregnancy or AIDS.
Those exhortations and warnings will be heard again this weekend when an expected 500 area Baptists meet in Towson for a "True Love Waits" conference, a national movement to encourage teens to sign sexual abstinence pledges as part of their commitment to God.
But alongside AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases often take a back seat in such discussions. That's a disservice to everyone, say local doctors who treat adolescents.
True, the consequences of pregnancy and AIDS may be more NTC extreme. But gonorrhea and chlamydia are statistically more likely -- affecting up to 35 percent of all sexually active women, in the case of chlamydia.
Of the 12 million new cases of STDs diagnosed each year, about one-fourth are in people under age 20. Gonorrhea rates, while down in the general population, have been called an epidemic among black teen-agers.
Meanwhile, gonorrhea and chlamydia are often difficult to detect in women, making them vulnerable to pelvic inflammatory disease, which can lead to fertility problems later in life. An STD infection can make it easier to get HIV, through open sores that allow the AIDS virus to get into the bloodstream.
"I frankly don't think you can care for teen-agers without being acutely aware of STDs," says Dr. Marianne E. Felice, director of adolescent medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center. "We're not talking about just inner-city youths. This is a problem that crosses socio-economic lines."
Dr. Alain Joffe, director of adolescent medicine at Johns Hopkins Children's Center, hears strange bits of folklore from teen-agers convinced they can tell if a sexual partner is "clean."
"Teen-agers don't believe it can happen to them," he says. "They think: 'It's people who are promiscuous, people who are dirty. Bad kids get STDs.' And they don't see themselves in that light."
At the Laurence G. Paquin School in Baltimore, principal Rosetta Stith says her students began to take STDs seriously only after seeing people in the community with AIDS. Even then, it's difficult to convince teens they can be infected.
"Kids are visual. These diseases, you really can't see," Dr. Stith says of her students -- young mothers and mothers-to-be.
