Sick with desire
By Alex Goodman
Feb. 9, 2011 1:25 a.m.
Tonight, less than a week before Valentine’s Day, students attending the On-Campus Housing Council’s Sextravaganza can be made to feel dizzy and attempt to apply a condom.
Or, upon entering, they can receive a list of symptoms and track down the Ashe Center’s informational table to determine which sexually transmitted infection, if any, they have “contracted.”
According to Ryan Eckert, a fourth-year history and philosophy student and the lead programmer of the event, Sextravaganza will address issues of body image and self-identity partially through these mock activities but will focus primarily on sexual health.
“I don’t think students are as aware as they could be about how you can contract (STDs), or they’re just not thinking about it because they’re in an altered state,” Eckert said.
The event tonight might want to start with basic terminology. In the 1990s, the medical community decided to begin using the phrase “sexually transmitted infections,” a more accurate description than “diseases.” A disease by definition affects the functioning of the body and causes symptoms ““ some sexually transmitted infections can go unnoticed for long periods of time. But the switch failed to catch on, and chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are still frequently referred to as STDs.
Dr. Peter Kerndt’s division at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, for instance, is still named the Sexually Transmitted Disease Program. His office’s latest statistics, from the Sexually Transmitted Disease Morbidity Report for 2008, show that the rates of chlamydia, gonnorhea and syphilis for the West Service Planning Area, which includes Westwood, rank lower than average for the county.
But that region extends far beyond the UCLA community, including affluent areas such as Malibu and Beverly Hills, and some data suggests that the rates might be higher among the student population. In the most recent assessment from the American College Health Association, for instance, 1.1 percent of students polled reported that they had been diagnosed with chlamydia in the previous 12 months, compared with 0.2 percent of West area residents in the Department of Public Health report.
UCLA did not submit data to the association’s assessment, according to Evi Desser, a nurse practitioner at the Ashe Center. But the survey did collect information from 139 colleges around the country.
Data suggests that college-age people are especially at risk for contracting STDs. In the Center for Disease Control’s 2009 Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance, the 15-19 and 20-24 age group exhibited the highest rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis.
“Young adults are at high risk, and college students are part of that group,” said Pamina Gorbach, an associate professor of epidemiology at UCLA who has studied risk behaviors for STDs at the partnership level.
According to Desser, college-age people may have more sexual partners than other groups in a given amount of time and may engage in behaviors such as heavy drinking, which can lead to riskier sexual practices. And Kerndt said the target cells affected by chlamydia recede with age, making young people in some ways biologically more susceptible to infection.
There are issues of communication as well. Gorbach said people might feel uncomfortable or embarrassed talking to their partner about using a condom, and after contracting an STD, they may be afraid to share that information.
But sometimes, that information keeps itself hidden. Kerndt explained that this is a problem especially with syphilis, which in its primary phase manifests itself in a painless ulcer that can easily go unrecognized if not on the external genitalia.
Students may be unaware of such information, or that different sexual positions pose different levels of risk, Gorbach said. She added that many people falsely believe that anal intercourse is less dangerous, for example, or that STDs cannot be transmitted through oral sex.
But Gorbach, Kerndt and Desser all said that young people are for the most part aware of the basic risks of unprotected sex, and of the importance of condom use and communication with sexual partners. They don’t necessarily act accordingly, though.
“There’s often a big gap between knowledge and behavior, because you’re dealing with issues of self-confidence, self-worth,” Desser said. “Do you like yourself well enough to protect yourself?”
But tonight, to that end, the staff of Sextravaganza will make available large supplies of condoms, while various religious groups discuss abstinence and a Counseling and Psychological Services counselor gives a presentation about how to talk about sex.
“You bring a lot of people to one area, and then bombard them with sexual health information, and that maybe normalizes it,” Eckert said.
With reports from Tiffany Cheng, Bruin senior staff.
