In case you missed this news release from last month, here’s a clip from the US News report:
More than 3 million teenaged girls have at least one sexually transmitted disease (STD), a new government study suggests.
The most severely affected are African-American teens. In fact, 48 percent of African-American teenaged girls have an STD, compared with 20 percent of white teenaged girls.
“What we found is alarming,” Dr. Sara Forhan, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a teleconference Tuesday. “One in four female adolescents in the U.S. has at least one of the four most common STDs that affects women.”
“These numbers translate into 3.2 million young women nationwide who are infected with an STD,” Forhan said.
You can read the rest of the article here: full article
I’m looking for information that may exist that is more specific to our community in Pinal County and Maricopa County. I have heard statistics that place teen pregnancy rates at Florence High School (which is the major high school in the community I live) atop the national averages. If our higher teen pregnancy rates equates with a higher sexual activity, then it seems plausible that tendency could translate into higher STD rates as well.
What are your thoughts?
micahhutchison.com 
Yes, I think the correlation could be made. Or you could consider that maybe the higher pregnancy rates don’t necessarily correspond to higher rates of sexual activity, but rather, a higher percentage of unprotected sexual activity. If this were true though, it would still correlate to higher rates of STD’s.
What I have heard from some teachers at FHS is that there is a sub-culture of girls at that high school who actually desire to become pregnant at that age. Whether this is a result of lack of education or just because it’s “what their mother’s did” I’m not sure. Knowing that, however, makes it become an entirely new battleground in trying to combat it.