Teen moms clueless about how they got pregnant

This from TeenTribune:

A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third who didn't use birth control said the reason was they didn't believe they could pregnant.

Why they thought that isn't clear. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey didn't ask teens to explain.

But other researchers have talked to teen moms who believed they couldn't get pregnant the first time they had sex, didn't think they could get pregnant at that time of the month or thought they were sterile.

"This report underscores how much misperception, ambivalence and magical thinking put teens at risk for unintended pregnancy," said Bill Albert, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Other studies have asked teens about their contraception use and beliefs about pregnancy. But the CDC report released Thursday is the first to focus on teens who didn't want to get pregnant but did.

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex...

Legal Preparedness for Emergency School Closures

In response to national pandemic preparedness priorities, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asked the Centers for Law and the Public’s Health to review the state-level legal framework for reducing the density of school classrooms, with specific focus on the closure of schools, as a social distancing or social mitigation measure to slow the spread of an H5N1 influenza pandemic or similar highly contagious infectious disease.

CDC and the Centers at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown Universities announced the availability of the a new report:

Legal Preparedness for School Closures

in Response to Pandemic Influenza and Other Emergencies

Available online at http://www.publichealthlaw.net/Projects/panflu.php.

The Centers’ Report is focused on state-level laws that expressly address school closure (as contrasted with general communicable disease laws or other laws that may generally authorize or allow for school closure). The Report presents a summary description of these express school closure laws for all 50 states and D.C. (as of December 2006) in an informative Table (with hypertext links to many states’ laws) and accompanying analyses based on the authors’ observations.

The report is also accessible via CDC’s Public Health Law Program and the federal government's comprehensive pandemic influenza website (http://www.pandemicinfluenza.gov/).

Surevy Shows Decreased Risky Behavior by Youth

(FRANKFORT, Ky.) – Data from the most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) show that fewer Kentucky high school students are engaging in negative behaviors than in 2003.

The data was gathered in 2007 through the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey.

The YRBS measures what the CDC defines as the Six Critical Health Behaviors of Adolescents:
· alcohol and drug use
· injury and violence (including suicide)
· tobacco use
· nutrition
· physical activity
· sexual risk behaviors

Developed in 1992, the YRBS includes national, state and local school-based surveys of representative samples of 9th- through 12th-grade students. These surveys are conducted every two years, usually during the spring semester. The national survey, conducted by CDC, provides data representative of high school students in public and private schools in the United States. The state and local surveys, conducted by departments of health and education, provide data representative of public high school students in each state or local school district.

In Kentucky, the YRBS is given to a randomly selected sample of high school students. The data is reported as statewide totals only.

Highlights of the YRBS include:

Alcohol and Drug Use
· The percentage of students who had at least one drink of alcohol one or more days during their lifetime has decreased from 76.7 % in 2003 to 71.7% in 2007.
· The percentage of students who used marijuana one or more times during their lifetime has decreased from 43.3% in 2003 to 35.0% in 2007.

Injury and Violence
· The percentage of students who rode one or more times during the past 30 days in a car or other vehicle driven by someone who had been drinking alcohol decreased from 25.5% in 2003 to 20.3% in 2007.
· The percentage of students who carried a weapon such as a gun, knife or club on one or more of the past 30 days has increased from 18.5% in 2003 to 24.4% in 2007.
· The percentage of students who had been threatened or injured with a weapon such as a gun, knife or club on school property on one or more times during the past 12 months has increased from 5.2% in 2003 to 8.3% in 2007.

Tobacco Use
· The percentage of students who ever tried cigarette smoking has decreased from 71.1% in 2003 to 62.2% in 2007.
· The percentage of students who smoked cigarettes on school property on one or more of the past 30 days has decreased from 14.3% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007.

Nutrition
· The percentage of students who were at risk of becoming overweight in 2007 is 16.4%, which isn’t a statistically significant change from 2003.
· The percentage of students who were overweight in 2007 is 15.6%, which isn’t a statistically significant change from 2003.

Physical Activity
· In 2007, 32.9% of students were physically active for a total of at least 60 minutes per day on five or more of the past seven days.
· The percentage of students who attended physical education classes on one or more days in an average week when they were in school was 34.9% in 2003 and 31.0% in 2007. This is not a statistically significant change, but the percentages are moving down.

Sexual Risk Behaviors
· The percentage of students who ever had sexual intercourse in 2007 is 50.3%, not a significant change from 2003.
· Among students who had sexual intercourse during the past three months, the percentage that used a condom during last sexual intercourse is 59.0%, down from 61.7% in 2003 (not a statistically significant change).

The 2007 data is available on the Kentucky Department of Education’s Web site at http://www.education.ky.gov/KDE/Administrative+Resources/School+Health/Kentucky+YRBS+Survey.htm. The full CDC report will be made available online by mid-summer 2008 at http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/yrbs/index.htm.

SOURCE: KDE press release

1 in 4 teen girls has sexually transmitted disease

This from MSNBC:

Virus that causes cervical cancer most common, infertility second

CHICAGO - Startling government research on teenage girls and sexually transmitted diseases sends a blunt message to kids who think they’re immune:

It’s liable to happen to you or someone you know.

In the first study of its kind, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found at least one in 4 teenage American girls has a sexually transmitted disease.

The most common one is a virus that can cause cervical cancer, and the second most common can cause infertility. Nearly half the black teens in the study had at least one sexually transmitted infection, versus 20 percent among both whites and Mexican-American teens.

The study, released Tuesday at an STD prevention conference, has adolescent-health specialists pointing to possible reasons and offering potential solutions.

Blame is most often placed on inadequate sex education, from parents and from schools focusing too much on abstinence-only programs. Add to that a young person’s sense of being invulnerable.

“This is pretty shocking,” said Dr. Elizabeth Alderman, an adolescent medicine specialist at Montefiore Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital in New York.

“To talk about abstinence is not a bad thing,” but teen girls — and boys too — need to be informed about how to protect themselves if they do have sex, Alderman said.

Only about half of the girls in the study acknowledged having sex. Some teens define sex as only intercourse, yet other types of intimate behavior including oral sex can spread some diseases.

Among those who admitted having sex, the rate was even more disturbing — 40 percent had an STD...

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Press Release.

Staph Infections Reported at Schools Across the Country

RICHMOND, Va., Oct. 17 — A high school student hospitalized for more than a week with an antibiotic-resistant staph infection died on Monday, as schools across the country were reporting outbreaks of staph infections, including the antibiotic-resistant strain.

The student, Ashton Bonds, 17, was a senior at Staunton River High School in Moneta, Va., and Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, was diagnosed in him, his mother said.

Officials shut down all 22 schools in Bedford County for cleaning today in an effort to keep the illness from spreading, after students at Staunton River organized a protest overnight Monday, using text messages and social networking sites. On Tuesday, the student organizers led the Bedford County schools superintendent, James Blevins, on a tour of the Staunton River school to show him the state of its sanitation, particularly in its locker rooms.

Mr. Blevins said at a news conference today that the high school would be cleaned today by a commercial cleaning company, and the county’s 21 other schools would be cleaned by their janitors.

Health and education officials have reported that staph infections, including the serious MRSA strain, have spread through schools nationwide in recent weeks.

MRSA is a strain of staph bacteria that does not respond to penicillin or related antibiotics, though it can be treated with other drugs. The infection can be spread by skin-to-skin contact or through sharing an item, like a towel or a piece of sports equipment, that has been used by an infected person, particularly one with an open wound.

The news of staff infections spreading through schools coincides with a report by doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that nearly 19,000 people had died in the United States in 2005 after an MRSA infection.

The study, which is being published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that such infections may be twice as common as previously thought, according to its lead author, Dr. R. Monina Klevens.

If the mortality estimates are correct, the number of deaths associated with the MRSA germ would exceed those attributed to HIV-AIDS, Parkinson’s disease, emphysema or homicide each year...

This from the New York Times, Photo by Jeanna Duerscherl/Associated Press/Roanoke Times.

Girls' Suicide Rates Rise Dramatically

CDC Advises Prevention Programs

To Focus On Gender And Age Groups Most At Risk

(AP) The suicide rate among preteen and young teen girls spiked 76 percent, a disturbing sign that federal health officials say they can't fully explain.

For all young people between ages 10 to 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 - the biggest single-year bump in 15 years - in what one official called "a dramatic and huge increase."

The report, based on the latest numbers available, was released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and suggests a troubling reversal in recent trends.

Suicide rates had fallen by 28.5 percent since 1990 among young people. The biggest increase - about 76 percent - was in the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-old girls. There were 94 suicides in that age group in 2004, compared to 56 in 2003. The rate is still low, fewer than one per 100,000 population.

Suicide rates among older teen girls, those aged 15-19 shot up 32 percent; rates for males in that age group rose 9 percent.

"In surveillance speak, this is a dramatic and huge increase," Dr. Ileana Arias said of the overall picture. She is director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control....

This from CBS News.