Recent news in Reuters announced a study through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that revealed that in America, more than 1 in every 4 teen-age girl is infected with an STD (either chlamydia or HPV).
The article described the racial breakdown of the infected and a startling 48% of those infected are blacks, while 20% were whites and another 20% were Mexican-American.
When I announced the news to my health and living environment classes the other day, many of my students were not too shocked but they weren't shy about making suggestions about how to properly treat a girl right.
What scares me is that my students are in a phase of denial that their lives are so easily overlooked by statistics. They feel that the numbers never truly apply to them or that their own little world doesn't correspond to any meaningful conclusions that a study like this suggests.
Many students, though shocked by such numbers and odds, probably won't give this news a second thought. I could just be making generalizations but it seems like students are completely and blissfully unaware that the world has little or no sympathy for their individual well-being. My kids are totally ignorant of common public health threats and to spend my time teaching them about common public health issues is just a waste of my precious time that should be spent preparing students for their Regents in June.
What do we do to better educate the public of common health threats and make sure that they take these risks seriously? I mean, I understand that no matter how well-informed a population, there's always a group of people who follow the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality which basically means they won't do anything until they are symptomatic. Is it really so hard to look out for your own health?
I feel like students have become more reactionary than precautionary. They learn by making mistakes rather than avoiding mistakes.
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