Topic: If You're Going to America, Party Before You Leave
“CDC’s new estimates show that there are about 20 million new infections in the United States each year, costing the American healthcare system nearly $16 billion in direct medical costs alone,” said a CDC fact sheet.
The CDC study—“Sexually Transmitted Infections Among U.S. Women and Men: Prevalence and Incidence Estimates, 2008”—was published in the March edition of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, the journal of the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Association.
The study distinguishes between “incidences” of a disease, which is the number of new infections in a year, and the “prevalence,” which is the total number of new and existing infections.
“In 2008, there were an estimated 110 million prevalent STIs among women and men in the United States,” said the study. “Of these, more than 20% of infections (22.1 million) were among women and men aged 15 to 24 years. Approximately 19.7 million incident infections occurred in the United States in 2008; nearly 50% (9.8 million) were acquired by young women and men aged 15 to 24 years.”
The study focused on estimating the incidences of sexual transmission of particular diseases as opposed to other forms of transmission. For example, it did not include HIV infections that were not sexually transmitted. It also counted the number of infections rather than the number of people infected--recognizing that a single individual could have multiple infections.
“When calculating the number of prevalent and incident infections, only those infections that were sexually transmitted were counted,” said the CDC fact sheet. “In general, CDC estimated the total number of infections in the calendar year, rather than the number of individuals with infection, since one person can have more than one STI at a given time (e.g., HPV and chlamydia) or more than one episode of a single STI (e.g., repeat chlamydia infection).”
The most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States in 2008 was human papillomavirus (HPV), which caused 14,100,000 estimated infections that year.
After HPV, in order of magnitude, according to the study, new STIs in the U.S. in 2008 included 2,860,000 new Chlamydia infections; 1,090,000 new Trichomoniasis infections; 820,000 new Gonorrhea infections; 776,000 new Herpes Simplex Virus Type 2 (HSV-2) infections; 55,400 new syphilis infections; 41,400 new HIV infections; and 19,000 new Hepatitis B infections.
The total of 110,197,000 existing STIs in the United States in 2008 included 79,100,000 HPV infections, 24,100,000 HSV-2 infections; 3,710,000 Trichomoniasis infections; 1,579,000 Chlamydia infections; 908,000 HIV infections; 422,000 Hepatitis B infections; 270,000 Gonorrhea infections; and 117,000 Syphilis infections.
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