Kids and Health Care: Sexual Activity

Your great hope, as a parent, will probably be that if your child has used alcohol or drugs no other harm has followed. Drinking and driving is one worry, once the kid is old enough to drive. But the larger worry is probably that the child will act recklessly while drunk or high. And the riskiest kind of reckless behavior is sex.

While they represent just a quarter of sexually active people in the U.S., teenagers and young adults account for nearly half the cases of sexually transmitted diseases, according to one study from the

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report, which appeared in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, said that people aged 15 to 24 accounted for an estimated 9.1 million cases of eight kinds of STDs in the year 2000. There were 18.9 million new STD cases overall in the U.S. that year.

A separate CDC report estimated that those 9.1 million cases of STDs in teens and young adults have an estimated lifetime medical cost of $6.5 billion.

Three STDs -- chlamydia, human papillomavirus and trichomoniasis -- were responsible for 88 percent of the 9.1 million new STD cases in teens and young adults in the year 2000. (The other STDs tracked were HIV, genital herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea and hepatitis B.)

The "good" news here is that health plans are relatively generous about covering treatments and prescriptions for STDs. And many free clinics make a specialty of treating STDs cheaply -- but effectively.