The sexual revolution is continuing but at a much earlier age and with a much greater risk of contracting disease, according to two new medical studies from Britain.
One showed that the risk of sex infections tripled among under-16s attending sexual health clinics. Another showed that the incidence of genital herpes caused by sex is on the rise, particularly among young teenagers.
The two reports are published today in Sexually Transmitted Infections, one of the British Medical Journal's specialist journals. They suggest that young teens are involved in sex at an early age, a time when they are least likely to take the kind of precautions needed to help avoid sexually transmitted diseases.
The most startling of the two is entitled "News from the front line: sexually transmitted infections in teenagers attending a genito-urinary clinic in south-east London". Dr Sarah Creighton and colleagues at the Camden Primary Care Trust in London analysed the profile of clients aged 16 and under during two months in 1998. Ages ranged from just 12, with the average age of the 162 young people surveyed about 15.
Most, 144, were young women, but the authors suggested that the males were just as active but much less likely to attend a clinic. Twenty-seven of the women, almost one in five,were pregnant. Most had been pregnant at least once and one had been pregnant 10 times. Of the 117 who were not pregnant at the time, three-quarters said they were not using any form of contraception.
About two-thirds of the girls had sexually transmitted infections, a rate almost three times that of other women attending the clinic. They were three times as likely to have gonorrhoea and chlamydia as other clinic users.
The authors noted that sexual health-clinic attenders were not typical of all teenagers, but the results showed that more must be done to target this age group.
The study of how the common oral cold-sore virus was increasingly the cause of genital herpes infections also showed that these infections were "strongly associated" with an early start to sex. Dr Frances Cowan and colleagues of the Royal Free and University College Medical School, London, conducted the research.
Her findings were based on blood samples and surveys conducted on 869 people attending a central London sexual health clinic and from 1,494 blood donors. About 60 per cent of clinic attenders and 46 per cent of blood donors showed evidence of previous or current infection with the virus that causes cold sores on the mouth, HSV-1.
