Herpes

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Herpes – painful sores around the genital area – is caused by the Herpes Simplex Virus.  Condoms can’t stop HSV either, and no drug can cure it.  Herpes is for life.  It can be spread orally.  Who’s got it? Could be your first date.

The Government’s Teenage Pregnancy Strategy policy is already not working even in its own terms. Pregnancy rates aren’t falling. In 2002, Public Health Minister Hazel Blears MP issued a triumphant press release to say that teenage conception rates had fallen in 2001 for the third year in a row. The reduction from 2000 to 2001 had been 3% in under 18’s, and the total reduction, she claimed, had been 9% over the three years since 1998. http://www.info.doh.gov.uk/tpu/tpu.nsf/0/8e425a17781af02380256dc9002aefc8?OpenDocument ‘These figures show very encouraging progress towards our goal of halving the under 18 conception rate by 2010,’ she said. It was not to last. The latest figures, for 2002, show conceptions in under 18’s back to over their 2000 level. Download from: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=4877&More=Y

The raw figures for under-18 conceptions are:

1998

44119

1999

42,028

2000

41,348

2001

40,990

2002

41,868

The 2001 and 2002 figures are still provisional, but they don’t usually change much. The 2002 figure is now only 5% down over 1998, 1.2% up on 2000, and the trend is increasing, with the 2002 figure over 2% up on 2001. The Teenage Pregnancy target of a 50% reduction by 2010 is now sure to go the same way as the targets in the last Government condom-based initiative, Virginia Bottomley’s ‘Health of the Nation’ programme of 1992.

Indeed, the organisation Family and Youth Concern found pregnancy rates increasing in precisely those areas of the country where the Government are most ahead with the teenage pregnancy strategy: http://www.famyouth.org.uk/pdfs/SEOIpressreleaseweb.pdf

But the almost frenzied promotion of ‘safer sex’ has done even more damage in the rate of increase of sexually-transmitted diseases some of which have doubled in six years: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_144555.html

The uncomfortable truth is, for as much as they have gone along with the idea of sex education based on the ‘safer sex’ model, a large part of responsibility for the disaster of teenage pregnancy and disease really does lie with the schools. It is the school governors who bear the responsibility for the school’s sex education policy, although they will often simply adopt the local authority guidance which will be based on the DfES guidance:
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/sreguidance/sexeducation.pdf which itself relies heavily on the safer-sex idea.

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