According to a report just out, by the time you’ve finished your three-hour morning class, approximately 154 people will have been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection (STI). And around 48% per cent of them are likely to be young like you. So if you’re aged between 15-24 (which includes most students) it’s highly likely your fondlings could lead to fiddle sticks if you fail to take precautions.
It takes just 30 seconds to put a condom on, yet an STI is diagnosed every 70 seconds here in England, and cases of syphilis are soaring to the highest rates since World War II.
If you thought that was bad, sexual health services are also struggling to tackle the threat of drug-resistant STIs. In 2018 three cases of extensively drug-resistant gonorrhoea (XDR-DG) emerged. Eeek.
These are just some of the alarming facts and figures plastered across our timelines from the report just released by The British Association for Sexual Health & HIV (BASHH) and The Terrence Higgins Trust, the charity which has helped coordinate the ‘Giving HIV The Finger’ campaign to remind us how necessary and how easy it is to test for HIV.
Excuse the pun but this new report certainly deserves a clap. It warrants our applause because these figures need our attention. And I don’t know about you but I’m scared.
On the other hand panic doesn’t do anyone any good. So are we really in the midst of a sexual health crisis? Or is this yet another example of fear being generated tactically in a bid to secure not just attention but also funding?
Even where budgets are increasing, demand is as well, so competition for funding constantly intensifies. Every public service is looking for ways to make their campaign seem more critical than the rest. And there’s nothing like a medical – and by implication ‘moral’ – panic about suggested promiscuity and its terrible effects to ramp things up and grab the headlines.
So as the wheel of fortune spins in the run up to the April budget, what will the arrow of Tory attention land on? Will it be the climate crisis; the housing crisis; the child mental health crisis; the NHS crisis; or this latest sexual health crisis? Who will win the lottery over public spends? Given that public spending on sexual health services has been cut by a quarter since 2014, maybe this should be the crisis that counts.
But until the next one comes along who knows? All I know is the country is as usual divided, with one side in a constant state of panic and the other totally insouciant.
