Prevention Matters

Baltimore’s holistic approach to unhealthy housing was named the “Best Prevention Idea of the Week,” while the increase in casual sex was named the “Worst Prevention Idea of the Week."

The “Best/Worst” awards are announced each week in “Prevention Matters,” the blog of Partnership for Prevention. Nominees are submitted by Partnership staff as well as the general public, and are voted on by the staff. Partnership for Prevention is a nonpartisan organization of business, nonprofit and government leaders who are working to make evidence-based disease prevention and health promotion a national priority. More information is available at http://www.prevent.org/.

BEST

Baltimore takes a holistic approach to unhealthy housing

Baltimore is the site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's first Healthy Homes program, an attempt to coordinate efforts on lead abatement, asthma and injury prevention, indoor air pollution and fire safety. "It's not unusual for a community health worker to take care of lead only to have a child die in a fire, or fall out the window," said Mary Jean Brown, chief of the Lead Poisoning Prevention branch at CDC. "The Healthy Homes approach recognizes all these things that can happen in homes. So you take your lead prevention army and equip them with tools so that they can address more than one problem at once."

WORST

Casual Sex Increasing in U.S.

People in non-romantic sexual relationships today are likely to have multiple partners, researchers have found, and that behavior could promote the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. "The United States has seen a major shift toward non-romantic sexual partnerships -- people becoming sexually involved when they are just casually dating or not dating at all," study author Anthony Paik, a sociologist at the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said in a university news release. "People can make their own choices, but we hope this information will be useful as they weigh the risks and rewards of non-romantic sexual relationships," Paik said. "We encourage people to be aware of the potential for sexual concurrency and take appropriate precautions to avoid sexually transmitted infections."

Increasing rates of HPV infection, spread through oral sex, is largely driving the rapid rise in oropharyngeal cancers, says Dr. Scott Lippman, who chairs the thoracic department at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Lippman says studies of oropharyngeal tumor tissue stored 20 years ago show that only around 20% are HPV positive. Today it is estimated that 60% of patients are infected with the virus.

Octo-Mom placed the challenges posed by infertility treatments squarely in the public eye, but in this and other discussions of infertility and its treatment, I never remember anyone mentioning that some infertility can actually be prevented.

It turns out that various infections, with chlamydia being the most common especially in young women, can progress to pelvic inflammatory disease which, untreated, can result in infertility and other serious reproductive tract problems. In pregnant women, chlamydia infections may be passed to the newborn. Surprised? I was.

And more alarming, by the time they reach 25, 1 in 2 young people will contract an STD and most will not know it. Chlamydia and other infections can be detected by a simple, non-invasive urine test and treated with an antibiotic. Yet this year, the rates of chlamydia infection continued to climb to record highs according to the CDC.

So why aren’t all sexually active young women routinely receiving this evidence-based preventive medical care? Public awareness is low and some young women incorrectly assume that they are tested for STDs whenever they receive a Pap test. Healthcare providers face barriers from lack of reimbursement for screening tests (as opposed to testing a patient with symptoms), to misperceptions that “my patients” aren’t the type to get this infection, to concerns about being able to confidentially treat a young person whose medical coverage is in a parent’s name.

Partnership for Prevention, working closely with CDC, has convened key groups interested in improving screening rates into the National Chlamydia Coalition and has developed a guide for healthcare providers to make screening a routine part of medical care. Read more at www.prevent.org/NCC.