STI Awareness Month

20 million new sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the U.S. each and every year.

20 million…

ASHA recognizes each April as STI Awareness Month and an appropriate theme this year might be STIs By the Numbers.

Spring Break, College Hookups, and Doctors

Spring Break is here and it’s time to party. For many college students, this can mean finding oneself in a stranger's bed having no recollection of the previous night's activities. We laugh about it afterwards, but no one talks about the health implications.

Wrapping It Up Still Feels Good – Why the Bad Rap?

We’ve all heard it before – sex with condoms isn’t as good as sex without condoms.

However, a new study by ASHA board member Dr. Debby Herbenick and other researchers from Indiana University’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion shows that condoms’ bad rap might be unwarranted.

Connections: Sexual Health, Society, and HIV

The XIX International AIDS conference was recently held in Washington, D.C. It had been 22 years since the International AIDS conference was held in the United States (mainly due to the unwillingness on the part of the United States to grant visas for HIV-infected individuals–only recently lifted).

Here 25,000 scientists, policy makers, health and education ministry officials, advocates, and activists from around the world were gathered with a renewed determination to stem the tide of this epidemic.  Medical advances, improved access to care, prevention initiatives, and revived determination were all good signs, but as a global culture we will need to shift our perspective to stop the spread of HIV.

Putting Sex into STD Prevention

One evening, during the week of the 2001 ISSTDR meeting in Berlin, I met with a couple of colleagues for beers after the day’s proceedings. We lamented the fact that the focus of these types of conferences was always on disease and that a broader sexuality frame work was missing. “It is time to put sex into STD prevention”, one of my colleagues said.  The comment was a bit wistful at the time and I don’t think any of us could have foreseen that a decade later our field is expressing so much more interest in sexuality and sexual health.