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Risky sexual behaviors prevalent among Americans
Last Updated: 2001-04-12 16:01:04 EDT (Reuters Health)
By Emma Patten-Hitt, PhD
ATLANTA (Reuters Health) - In a 1997 survey, about 11% of Americans reported multiple sex partners within the previous year and 4.2% reported other behaviors that put them at high risk of acquiring or transmitting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report the survey results in the April 13th issue of its journal, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
"What the findings show is that there is still a need for education about behaviors that put people at increased risk for HIV," Dr. Amy Lansky, an epidemiologist with the CDC's National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention, told Reuters Health.
The data were collected from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a telephone survey of the civilian, noninstitutionalized US adult population. In the 1997 survey, questions about sexual behavior were administered in 23 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to individuals 18 to 49 years of age.
Dr. Lansky says she cannot speculate about whether data that are more recent would be similar to the 1997 data, but she notes that fewer states have reported this information in subsequent years.
"It's not an insubstantial percentage of people who are at risk--4.2%," she said. "The good news is...the low percentage suggests that people do know about how to prevent HIV." "But what you do have to take into consideration is that there has been a lot of education and information disseminated about HIV, so in order to keep those levels low, we need to continue that kind of effort."
MMWR 2001;50:262-265.
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