Screaming Headlines

It isn't exactly a state secret that the U.S. is having a major epidemic of sexually transmitted disease. Reportedly syphilis, once almost eradicated, is back. Recent CDC figures for chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes 2 infection among teens are alarming. Less than 10 percent of teens screened for STDs give their orientation as gay. Yet government and news media continue to obsess about gay sex. In view of CDC's decision to consider STDs and tuberculosis as co-factors of HIV infection, this old obsession is making for new screaming headlines. We are entering Stage 2 of 1980s AIDS hysteria.

In April, for instance, 51 cases of syphilis among L.A. County gay men made the Los Angeles Times. L.A.'s Channel 2, which loves to wring every ounce of drama out of drive-bys and hot pursuits on the freeways, did high drama about the public-health vans pulling up in West Hollywood and Silverlake to make testing available to gay men. From there, the gay drama reverberated around the world, as far away as India, where it was noted by the SATHI AIDS newsletter.

According to the Times, "Health officials in Los Angeles County report that a syphilis outbreak among gay men in the area has doubled to 51 cases in two weeks. Peter Kerndt, director of the county's sexually transmitted diseases program, noted that 28 of the 51 men have HIV, which is particularly worrisome because syphilis sores increase the risk of HIV transmission ... Last year, none of the 120 syphilis cases recorded in Los Angeles County were among gay men, suggesting that this year there has been a decline in safe sex practices among some gay men in the area."

The same month, the AP screamed another headliner: "A tuberculosis outbreak in the transgender communities of Baltimore and New York City may be spreading to other cities, the government said Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 26 active cases and 37 dormant cases of tuberculosis, most of them connected to members of the transgender community in the two cities. The government said 62 percent of the tuberculosis patients tested positive for HIV."

These stories come on the heels of earlier screamers from San Francisco, over 17 cases of syphilis that the San Francisco Dept. of Public Health insisted were linked to gay male chat rooms on the Internet. Months later, statements by SFDPH, claiming that gay male sex practices are still driving the AIDS epidemic, are still reverberating nationwide.

I wonder why news media aren't screaming just as loudly about rising HIV infection among young heterosexual people. According to the CDC, "HIV infection and AIDS are now the sixth leading cause of death among young persons aged 15 to 24 years."

And where are the screaming headlines on other STDs among the nation's teens? According to the CDC website: "Each year, approximately three million cases of sexually transmitted diseases occur among teenagers."

Let's look at chlamydia. This STD is caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis, and can be spread even by simple skin or body contact. Says CDC grimly on their website: "Chlamydia is the most frequently reported infectious disease in the United States. From 1984 through 1997, reported rates of chlamydia increased from 3.2 to 207.0 cases per 100,000 population. Based on reports to CDC provided by states that collect age-specific data, teenage girls have the highest rates of chlamydial infection." One of every 10 girls screened were chlamydia+.

The stark CDC report goes on: "Because approximately 75 percent of women and 50 percent of men have no symptoms, most people infected with chlamydia are not aware of their infections. Untreated, chlamydia can cause severe, costly reproductive and other health problems. Up to 40 percent of women with untreated chlamydia will develop PID [pelvic inflammatory disease]. Of those with PID, 20 percent will become infertile; 18 percent will experience debilitating, chronic pelvic pain; and 9 percent will have a life-threatening tubal pregnancy. Tubal pregnancy is the leading cause of first-trimester, pregnancy-related deaths in American women."

In other words, hundreds of thousands of young women will not be having children because of chlamydia -- making zero population growth more of a reality than "Earth First" worries ever did.

So serious is the chlamydia threat that CDC calls for "screening of all sexually active females under 20 years of age at least annually, and annual screening of women ages 20 and older with one or more risk factors for chlamydia (i.e., new or multiple sex partners and lack of barrier contraception). All women with infection of the cervix and all pregnant women should be tested."

Translation: national mandatory chlamydia screening of all pregnant women, same as New York State now requires for HIV. This is serious stuff, folks.

So why are news anchors and wire services not screaming to high heaven about chlamydia? Why are public-health mobile vans not pulling up to every high school in the country? If the CDC wants sexually active girls screened, what better place to do it than at school?

Genital herpes (herpes simplex virus 2) is another STD that news screamers are curiously quiet about. HSV-2 is still incurable, can also be spread by skin-to-skin contact. In cases where a herpes-positive mother is shedding virus at delivery time, her baby could be fatally infected. Under existing criminal law, HIV+ mothers are being prosecuted for attempted murder simply for breast-feeding their babies. If the legislative geniuses who passed these criminal laws were to push their logic, they would prosecute HSV-2+ mothers for attempted murder as well.

CDC makes this dire pronouncement about HSV-2: "Nationwide, 45 million people ages 12 and older, or one out of five of the total adolescent and adult population, is infected with HSV-2. HSV-2 infection is more common in women (approximately one out of four women) than in men (almost one out of five). Since the late 1970s, the number of Americans with genital herpes infection (i.e., prevalence) has increased 30 percent."

CDC adds ominously: "In the United States, HSV-2 may play a major role in the heterosexual spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Herpes can make people more susceptible to HIV infection, and can make HIV-infected individuals more infectious." So where are the high-decibel headlines about herpes?

When discussing sexual orientation, the CDC often leans hard on the homosexual threat. In its web pages on teen STDS, it says, "Adolescents who are at high risk for STDs include male homosexuals, sexually active heterosexuals," etc. This strange wording suggests that male homosexuals get STDs just by breathing, whereas straight kids get infected only if they actually have sex. CDC has a whole subpage for "women who have sex with women" and tries hard to make a case for lesbian risk, though by their own admission they can't find any U.S. cases where woman/woman sex was the only risk factor. Their most recent breakdown of case reporting shows no figures for lesbian AIDS.

Clearly some government officials and news media are suffering from a disease of their own. Namely, the homophobia that still drives AIDS hysteria in this country. Homophobia is now infecting the larger STD epidemic. It would appear that some public-health and media people are doing this deliberately, hoping to frighten 90 percent of America's population back to sexual health by the show-biz trick of spotlighting disease among 10 percent of the population.

So I'm doing some screaming of my own. Why? Not just because I'm sick of gay sex being demonized. We badly need equal air-time for those millions of heterosexual STDs out there. The STD epidemic has been building since sexual revolution started in the '60s and '70s. The CDC has known this for a long time. Yet Americans are being led to believe that sexually transmitted disease is the fault of those "bad, bad gay men"...that the epidemic can be stamped out by fingering gay people, by insisting that their STD infections are co-factors of AIDS.

Government officials and media people who fail to put those millions of STDs on the six o-clock news must shoulder the lion's share of blame for this vaster epidemic.

Patricia Nell Warren, author of The Front Runner, writes commentary for many gay and mainstream publications. Her editorials are archived at www.wildcatpress.com.