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Young women risk chlamydia more than once: study

Posted on: Tuesday, 9 May 2006, 14:14 CDT

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.

Source: REUTERS

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