Young women risk chlamydia more than once: study

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Young women risk being infected with
chlamydia more than once, researchers reported on Tuesday in a
series of studies showing just how vulnerable younger women are
to the disease.

But other studies presented at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention conference showed that screening people
– including jail inmates — can reduce the rate of infection
across entire communities.

The findings may also show that younger women are more
susceptible to and do not understand the risks of not only
chlamydia, but other sexually transmitted diseases, the
researchers told the conference being held in Jacksonville,
Florida.

Chlamydia is the most common STD among women and, in 70
percent of cases, causes no symptoms. The bacterial infection
can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and
infertility. It can also make a woman more likely to be
infected with or to pass on the AIDS virus.

New York City Department of Health researchers Ellen
Klingler and colleagues tested nearly 40,000 women in two
studies, one in 2000 and another from 2003 to 2004. One in
eight women diagnosed with chlamydia citywide had a repeat
infection within a year and a third of three happened within
three months.

The women aged under 19 were much more likely to have been
infected repeatedly than women over 25, they found. A study of
400,000 women making routine doctor visits in California found
similar rates, with one in 10 women infected with chlamydia
becoming infected again within six months.

“These findings tell us that many young women who are
treated for chlamydia are likely being reinfected by male
partners who are not being diagnosed and treated,” said Dr.
Ronald Valdiserri, director of the National Center for HIV,
Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Tuberculosis Prevention.

WORKING HARDER TO EDUCATE

Valdiserri said doctors and clinics need to work harder to
get women to notify their sexual partners, routinely re-screen
women, and perhaps try innovative approaches such as giving the
women antibiotics to take to their partners.

An Emory University study done of 800 college and
university students in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama showed
that 9.7 percent of all the young women had chlamydia but 13
percent of the freshmen, or first-year, women were infected.

Dr. Pennan Barry of the San Francisco Department of Public
Health and colleagues at the San Francisco County Jail found
that screening and treating inmates protected not just the men
and women in jail, but their communities.

From 1997 to 2004 more than 31,000 men and 11,700 women
inmates were screened and treated for chlamydia and other STDs.
Then the researchers looked at the neighborhoods where the
inmates came from.

There, rates of chlamydia among young women fell by half
between 1997 and 2004, from 15 percent to 8 percent. That
compared to a 6 percent decrease, from 3.3 percent to 3.1
percent, in neighborhoods where jail inmates did not live.

Other researchers found many women are engaging in risky
behaviors.

Dr. Charlotte Gaydos and colleagues at Johns Hopkins
University found that among women using an online STD
self-testing program, at http:// www.iwantthekit.org., more
than 15 percent said they had four or more sex partners in the
past year.

Just 16 percent of the women with chlamydia and 12 percent
of the uninfected women reported always using condoms.

Another study at Johns Hopkins University found the number
of 15- to 25-year-old females treated at Baltimore STD clinics
over the past decade who reported having oral sex more than
doubled, from 14 percent to 38 percent.

The number of young women reporting they had anal sex
nearly doubled, from 3 percent to 5.5 percent.