Give credit to the "Use a condom" message. Or the "Don't have sex until you're married" message. Or both.
Something seems to be working, because sexually transmitted disease rates in Hamilton County dropped dramatically in 1996, to their lowest levels since 1993, according to a report from the Cincinnati Health Department. The report compiled statistics on 48 communicable diseases.
Among the findings:
- New AIDS cases down 45 percent from 1995 and down 76 percent from 1993.
- Gonorrhea cases down 47 percent from 1995 and down 67 percent from 1993.
- Syphilis cases down 58 percent from 1995 and down 75 percent from 1993.
- Chlamydia cases down 47 percent from 1995 and down 37 percent from 1993.
The across-the-board declines in sexually transmitted diseases reflect a mix of national, state and local efforts to warn people about unsafe sexual practices, said Dr. Malcolm Adcock, Cincinnati's health commissioner.
"There has been a lot of work done over the past several years to get the message out," he said. "We'd like to hope that people are taking the message seriously."
Just don't ask Dr. Adcock to guess which type of safe-sex message is working best, especially among programs targeting youths. He declined to step between the factions who favor condom distribution programs vs. those who want more emphasis on abstinence.
"What works for one person may not work for another. So, as many different kinds of messages as you can give tends to give the overall sense that this is an important issue," Dr. Adcock said.
The declining AIDS cases also reflect improved early treatments that have delayed the onset of AIDS among people infected by the HIV virus, he said.
While the statistics reflected good news about sexual diseases, Dr. Adcock still sounded a note of caution about AIDS.
Public health officials remain concerned about an AIDS "echo" resulting from a syphilis epidemic that peaked in 1994 at 832 cases in Hamilton County. Because it can take a long time for HIV cases to turn into AIDS cases, it still might take a year or two for the impact of that epidemic to be felt, Dr. Adcock said.
