STIs in the UK

Christine Aziz explains why British prudishness is set to cost lives in the future

The new government strategy to tackle the rise in sexually transmitted infections could be too little too late. It seems many of us have spent years ignoring the safe sex message and are now paying the price.There's been an 80% increase in syphilis in the past five years, a 56% increase in gonorrhoea and a 76% increase in chlamydia - an infection that can lead to infertility, ectopic pregnancies and pelvic infections. At the same time, the number of new and known heterosexual HIV cases has risen by almost 40% since 1992. So what has gone wrong?

The present increase in STIs (sexually transmitted infections) is in stark contrast to the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was a notable reduction in cases. This was attributed to the HIV/AIDS awareness campaign, which graphically linked the infection to an untimely death and warned of the dangers of unsafe sex.According to the Terence Higgins Trust the safe sex message has since skipped a whole generation. 'There was the big HIV campaign in 1986 and after that it was forgotten,' says the Trust's Mark Graver. 'The government's new health strategy is welcome, but it is a little late. The HIV epidemic the government expected to see in the l980s didn't happen, but it could still occur if the safe sex message is not promoted effectively and people remain ignorant of HIV and AIDS.'

Grim reading
The latest Department of Health survey on contraception, conducted in 1997, reveals that only 50% of couples take precautions against sexually transmitted infections. The majority of those use condoms to prevent pregnancy, rather than to protect against STIs. Only four in 10 credited their use with fears over HIV and AIDS. At the same time, figures show only a third of women under 50 have even heard of chlamydia, currently the most common infection in the UK.

It is a shocking ignorance. And a dangerous one. It owes more to our Victorian outlook when discussing sex than to any personal shortcomings: it is just not done to have a public debate about it. It speaks volumes that the launch of a recent safe sex campaign by a Merseyside health promotion agency was ignored by the local newspaper for fear that it would cause offence.