Last week an eye-catching infographic was posted at Online Colleges, a resource for people looking for information on web-based education and related topics. The graphic alarmingly states that 1 in 4 college students have a sexually transmitted disease, citing improper or lack of male condom use and the consumption of alcohol as major contributing factors. The graphic, featuring an illustration of a young Caucasian male wearing a fetching pair of boxer shorts, was immediately picked up by a number of blogs and websites for college students. It seems the idea that getting sick from having sex is new and surprising to young people, and that’s as disturbing as the 1 in 4 statistic.
The infographic was created in-house using data collected from a number of third-party sources: getstdtested.com, a business that provides at-home STD testing for outrageous fees, stdandhivtesting.com, another service fee-based testing service, collegehealthadvisor.com, a clearinghouse of articles related to generalized health on campus, nursingschools.net, a guide for online nursing schools, ashastd.org, a page from the American Social Health Association, who advocate the same STD prevention methods as the CDC (see below), stdservices.org.net, a defunct address for a page now called yeah.com, that bastion of completely vetted double-blind tested scientific information: wikipedia, and cdc.gov, the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
When asked why the team chose to exclude women who have sex with women as a demographic, Muhammad Saleen, one of the creators of the poster said: “It was not our intention to exclude anyone from our infographic, all the data presented on there is from third-party sources and data sets and any gaps in the information are because of the datasets used.” [Read more...]
Teen Girls Bear the Burden of STD’s According to CDC – 
Dear Mr. Stupak, Do You Trust Women? – 
Yes, that would be correct. Today, June 27th, is national HIV testing day…and everyone should use this as an opportunity to increase awareness surrounding issues of bodily health. It is absolutely vital, as feminists, to take our health into our own hands and stay fully informed about our bodies. The National HIV testing day is an annual campaign coordinated by the National Association of People with AIDS, in an attempt to get people of ALL AGES, to get tested. 
