High Life : A WEEKLY FORUM FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS : Confronting Issue of Sex and Disease

When Joseph A. Fernandez, chancellor of New York City’s board of education, said that high schools should make free condoms available without parental consent as part of an AIDS education program, the nation was stunned. To Fernandez, such a step was a matter of life and death: The city leads the nation in the number of adolescents with AIDS.

Some saw him as a hero trying to save lives; others, as a preacher of promiscuity. When the board finally approved the plan, by one vote, many people in other cities and towns took solace from the fact that the problem was New York’s, not theirs.

But they were wrong. All teen-agers--rich and poor, black and white, urban and rural--are endangered by an unprecedented epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Despite the well-publicized menace of AIDS and the increasingly conservative mood of the country, studies confirm that American teens are having lots of sex, and not just the safe kind:

* The Alan Guttmacher Institute, which researches and analyzes reproductive issues, reports that the proportion of sexually active girls aged 15 to 17 continues to rise, jumping from 32% in 1982 to 38% in 1988. The greatest increase was among white kids from higher-income families. And by age 19, 75% of unmarried women were having sexual intercourse.

* According to the 1988 National Survey of Adolescent Males, one-third of boys surveyed were sexually active at 15, half at 16, two-thirds at 17, and 86% at 19.

* AIDS is the seventh-leading cause of death among 15- to 24-year-olds in the United States, according to a recent report in the journal Medical Clinics of North America. While adolescents still represent only 1.2% of all AIDS cases, the number doubles every 14 months.

* The Centers for Disease Control reports that last year the incidence of AIDS in adolescent women increased by 67%, more than twice the rate for adolescent males.

* Some 3 million adolescents contract an STD each year, says the CDC. One in four of the sexually active will do so before graduating high school. Along with the shadow STDs cast on the future reproductive health of young men and women, some also increase the risk of getting AIDS.

Although the age-old problems of syphilis and gonorrhea have increased 300% among teens since 1956, today’s most prevalent STD is chlamydia, which strikes as many as one in seven sexually active girls and about one in 10 sexually active boys. And in one study, the virus that causes genital warts, which have been linked to cervical cancer, infected 38% of sexually active teens.

Part of the explanation for the STD epidemic among teens lies in the very nature of adolescence, a heady, defiant time of raging hormones, behavioral experimentation--and, ominously, a feeling of invulnerability. Telling kids to abstain from sex usually doesn’t work, and distributing condoms doesn’t guarantee they’ll be used.

Parents should try to talk about sex openly and candidly, says Dr. Mark Wade, medical director of the Cumberland Neighborhood Family Care Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“You can’t approach a teen saying, ‘Don’t have sex, it’s bad.’ The kid will react with, ‘Who are you to tell me?’ Instead, you could say, ‘I believe you shouldn’t have intercourse before high school ends or until you marry, for the following reasons. But if you decide that abstinence isn’t right for you, this is what you need to know to protect yourself.’ The idea is to make sure they have all the information possible before they have to make a choice.”