STD's Have Black Teens Learned Their Lesson?

"Practice safe sex." Or, more recently, the "Rap It Up" campaign from Black Entertainment Television. We’ve been hearing these cautionary messages for decades. Is the black community finally getting it?

Yes and no, according to the latest statistics on sexually transmitted diseases. The good news is that STD rates are decreasing steadily among African Americans. The bad news: The black community is still contracting STDs at a much higher rate than every other racial and ethnic group.

Coming off of the chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis epidemics of the late 1980s and early 1990s, STD rates have generally declined across the board. But African Americans are still decades behind most other racial and ethnic groups in STD prevention. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that even though gonorrhea rates have been declining each year since 1991, African Americans continue to contract the disease at 24 times the rate of whites. Almost 75 percent of the total number of gonorrhea cases reported to the CDC occurred among African Americans. Similarly, incidences of syphilis are down, but African Americans still accounted for half of the total cases of the disease reported in 2002.

In spite of countless awareness campaigns, advertisements and rap songs, the group that consistently reports the highest rate of infections is African Americans age 15-24. Black women in this age group have the highest occurrence of genital herpes and syphilis. Teenage African American males lead all other groups for gonorrhea infections.

Why is the black community contracting some STDs at rates that are more than 20 times that of whites? A recent CDC report called "STDs in Racial and Ethnic Minorities" blames "poverty, access to quality healthcare, health-care-seeking behavior, illicit drug use and living in communities with high prevalence of STDs.