Research Says STD Treatment Falling Behind

More than 1,200 international experts gathered this week in Seattle for the joint meeting of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research and the World Congress of the International Union Against Sexually Transmitted Infections. They were told that despite significant progress, many challenges confront efforts to control the diseases.

For every HIV patient who begins treatment, six more people become infected, said Dr. King Holmes, director of the Center for AIDS and STD and chair of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington (UW). "We're falling behind faster and faster," he said.

Conferees pondered numerous questions, such as the best ways encourage male circumcision, a procedure that has been shown to decrease the risk of female-to-male HIV transmission, and whether prevention campaigns developed for certain geographic and cultural settings can be transplanted to others.

The perception that STDs are just "disease[s] of promiscuity" frustrates researchers' efforts to secure adequate funding for their work, said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, a UW associate professor of medicine and chair of the conference's scientific organizing committee.

There was good news, however: Condom use by US teens is higher than in 1991, while fewer high school students report ever having had sex. And Holmes credited public health efforts for achieving some reductions in HIV rates in East Africa, Cambodia, and the Caribbean.

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