So, on the way to helping colleagues at the Council on Contemporary Families get out an awesome Valentine’s Day Fact Sheet on Sexual Health by GWP contributor Adina Nack, I learned something new: the difference between a sexually transmitted disease (STD) and a sexually transmitted infection (STI).
“Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are infections that result from the transmission of certain bacteria or viruses during physically intimate acts. An STI may or may not result in a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that has noticeable symptoms,” according to the CCF Fact Sheet.
The importance of this distinction was made clear in a cool May 2008 article by Neil Munro. The article, Birth of a Number, is only available to online subscribers to National Journal. But you just might want to check it out because he highlights how some casual headline writing can influence the way numbers end up as a squishy political football (like a nerf football), excessively dramatizing an already serious problem. The numbers are not inherently squishy, but sometimes their use is squishy. In particular, in this case, the number he was reporting about was the number that “1 in 4 American teenagers has an STD.” When it came out that number was “infectious,” and popped up in a lot of headlines. But that number really referred to STInfection, not STDisease. AS Munro pointed out, it became a handy number for hand-wringing about teen sluttishness, but it didn’t become a handy moment to communicate on any kind of practical level about what to do about sexually transmitted infections–or diseases.
Nack’s CCF fact sheet includes a lot of very good sources on STIs, STDs, and advice about how to communicate with your partner about them. It turns out it will help you address the issues, but it will also help you address the numbers we use to represent the issues.
Comments