WASHINGTON — Nearly half of high school students say they’ve had sex, yet progress has stalled in getting them to use condoms to protect against the AIDS virus, government researchers reported Tuesday.
Today, four of every 10 new HIV infections occur in people younger than 30, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and the teen years, just as many youths become sexually active, are key for getting across the safe-sex message.
Using a long-standing survey of high school students’ health, the CDC tracked how teen sexual behavior has changed over 20 years. The results are decidedly mixed.
About 60 percent of sexually active high school students say they used condoms the last time they had sex, researchers said at the International AIDS Conference. That’s an increase from the 46 percent who were using condoms in 1991.
“This is good news,” said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of CDC’s HIV prevention center. But, “we need to do a lot more.”
Condom use reached a high of 63 percent back in 2003.
Black students are most likely to heed the safe-sex message, yet their condom use dropped from a high of 70 percent in 1999 to 65 percent last year, the study found.
The proportion of high school students who’ve had sex is 47 percent today — down a bit from 54 percent in 1991 — and they typically start at age 16, CDC said. Black teens showed a bigger decrease, with 60 percent sexually active today compared with 82 percent two decades ago.
The more partners, the more risk. Fifteen percent of high school students say they’ve had four or more partners, down from 19 percent in 1991.
Fenton said many school systems don’t have strong enough sex education policies that include teaching teens about how to prevent HIV. But he cautioned that the CDC study can’t link the abstinence-only policies pushed by Congress through the late 1990s and early 2000s to the stalled condom use.
In the U.S., where new infections have stubbornly held at about 50,000 a year for a decade, complacency is part of the reason that progress in teen condom use has stalled, CDC’s Fenton said.
“We have to generate a new sense of urgency,” he said.
Overall, though, a characteristic of the young is to think they’re invincible, Fenton added.
Lawrence Stallworth II, 20, of Cleveland, can attest that they’re not. He learned he was infected with HIV at age 17, when he was a high school senior, after a hospitalization. A black gay man, he’s among one of the nation’s highest-risk groups.
He’s now an Ohio AIDS activist who works to teach young people that they need to protect themselves, and how.
“I want people to have the tools to keep themselves safe,” said Stallworth, who is working with the nonprofit Advocates for Youth to declare a National Youth HIV & AIDS Awareness Day in April to increase young people’s knowledge about their risk.
Part of that involves society getting “better at being more open about being able to talk about sex,” Stallworth said. “It’s still a taboo issue.”
