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Valentine's Day arrives again, and though many couples plan to celebrate their annual holiday together tonight, other Aggie students know all too well that VD can last far longer than one day.
The American Social Health Association website maintains updated statistics and information on venereal diseases. It estimates that more than half of all people will have a sexually transmitted disease or infection at some point in their lifetime. Even more worrisome for the college crowd, about half of all new STD and STI cases reported in the year 2000 occurred in youth between the ages of 15 and 24.
"A lot of STDs have no symptoms, and people don't know they have them," said Rhonda Rahn, the health education coordinator at the A.P. Beutel Health Center. "[This is especially true] with chlamydia and gonorrhea. Eighty percent of people with chlamydia don't know they have it, so they spread it to other people. [Then] that person has symptoms, but the original person doesn't even know they had it. There's a lot that goes unreported."
Rahn said that chlamydia is the most common bacterial STI and human papoloma virus is the most common virus. In 2007, an HPV vaccine was widely publicized when Texas Gov. Rick Perry tried to make it mandatory for young women.
"[The HPV vaccine] prevents spread of four of the types strains of HPV that cause the most cervical cancers," Rahn said. "HPV is the virus that causes warts all over the body. There are about 30 strains that love the genital area, and of those strains, four of them cause about 90 percent of cervical cancer. I look at it as a cancer preventing vaccine.
"It's one of those things that has just barely been out, just for over a year, so people might want to wait a few years. It's been shown to be effective, but only in the lab for long periods of time. In 10 years, we don't know if it will still be effective," she said.
Men do not have to worry about HPV causing cervical cancer, Rhonda said, because they don't have cervices.
The HPV vaccine is offered in Beutel for $150 a shot, which Rahn said is cheap relative to other clinics. The only other sexually transmitted virus for which someone can be vaccinated is Hepatitus B, a vaccination that is routinely given to all infants.
Dr. Andrew Dale, chief of medical staff at Beutel, said that for students who want to be tested for STDs, confidentiality worries should not be a fear that drives them away.
"Patient confidentiality is uniform with any patient in regards to their medical care. For adults, which are most of the college students 18 and older, it's on the medical chart," Dale said. "Parents don't have access to it, insurance companies don't have access to it. A patient has to give written consent in order to release those records."
"We always recommend that if you have ever had any kind of unprotected sex to get tested, at least for chlamydia and gonorrhea, because they don't show any symptoms and they can be really detrimental if you don't know you have them," Rahn said.
"Let's say you get chlamydia in college, 10 years down the road [you might find that] you can't have a baby because your fallopian tubes are so full of scar tissues from the chlamydia infection. Same thing with guys: if you don't get it treated and cured. The scar tissue can build up and it can lead to infertility."
College students may not know that protection is needed for every form of sex: vaginal, anal and oral.
"Condoms do a really good job of protecting against most infections, things that are in the fluids, as long as you use it every time you have sex and for every kind of sex," Rahn said. "And use it correctly, don't take it off and flip it over, that kind of defeats the purpose."
"Condoms offer the most protection, but even that's not absolute," Dale said. "There's no absolute [protection] other than not having sex. There's a risk with sex, but most people take the risk. You can minimize that risk by not having sex with people you don't trust or people you don't know, or use a condom, but that's essentially it.
"You can't prevent STDs by withdrawal. I've seen people get STDs from oral sex, because someone can have herpes, say orally, then give oral sex and transmit the virus in that fashion."
Rahn said that intercourse isn't necessary for the spread of all STDs. Herpes and HPV exist on the skin. They can be spread during skin-to-skin contact of the genitals. Even tanning beds are not safe, Rahn said. There is no state regulation on the cleaning of tanning beds, and research shows that people have picked up HPV from unclean tanning beds. As for the urban myth about getting crabs from a dirty toilet seat, Rahn said pubic lice can hang out in the toilet seat, but it's one of those possible yet not probable things.
If a student finds themselves in the unfortunate predicament of having had contracted an STI, they can get treatment for most infections.
"Chlamydia and gonorrhea are pretty easy to treat," Dale said. "There are different ways you can approach it, but essentially the easiest way is a one-time dose of an antibiotic and you're done."
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