Tag: sex

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Nation’s First Sex-Ed Standardized Testing Shows Students’ Gaps

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The District of Columbia has released results for the nation’s first-ever standardized test that includes sex-education, showing that fifth- and eighth-graders have a lot to learn about their bodies.

The test, known as the 2012 District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System (DC CAS), was administered to fifth-graders, eighth-graders and high school students throughout the city. Results were posted today, and show that even though students answered an average of 62 percent of questions correctly, they have work to do.

“The results that we received will be very helpful in determining the improvements needed to be made for teacher professional development training and create challenging material that can further student’s  interest and knowledge in personal health,” Ayan Islam, communications specialist for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, told ABC News.

Islam says the test is part of landmark state legislation passed in 2010, requiring agencies to provide more in-depth reporting and engagement of various community stakeholders with different interests.

More than 11,000 students from fifth-grade through high school were enrolled in health courses and then selected to take the 50-question exam in April. The exam measured students’ knowledge in health-related categories, including wellness, disease prevention, physical education and healthy decision-making. Read full article.

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New CDC Recommendation: One-Time Hepatitis C Test for Baby Boomers

ASRM News and Research

Current CDC recommendations focus on testing individuals with known hepatitis C risk factors. However, more than 75% of American adults with hepatitis C are baby boomers and baby boomers are five times more likely than adults of other ages to be infected.  Likely reasons for this disproportionate infection rate are that this generation may have received blood transfusions before screening of the blood supply began 20 years ago and because they came of age before HIV brought awareness of the risks of unprotected sex and needle sharing.

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Semen’s Secret Ingredient Induces Ovulation

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If you’re trying to avoid getting pregnant, here’s another reason to mistrust the rhythm method of birth control: New research confirms that the fluid in semen, long dismissed as primarily a vehicle for sperm, contains a substance that can trigger ovulation and other pregnancy-supporting hormonal responses in female mammals. The find could lead to new fertility treatments in humans.

Like most female animals, women are spontaneous ovulators, meaning they release eggs on a fairly regular basis regardless of their sexual activity. A few animal species, however, such as camels and rabbits, release viable eggs only in response to sex. These animals are called “induced ovulators.” For decades, scientific dogma has held that in induced ovulators, the physical stimulation of sex triggers hormonal responses within the female that lead to the production and release of eggs. In 1985, however, a group of Chinese researchers challenged this idea by suggesting that there might be an ovulation-inducing factor (OIF) in semen itself. According to veterinarian and reproductive biologist Gregg Adams of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, the hypothesis ran so counter to common wisdom that “people just ignored it. Me included.”

When Adams and his colleagues finally tested the idea decades later, they were taken aback by their results. In 2005, the team injected the seminal fluid of male llamas — closely related to camels — into the hind legs of female llamas to see if the llamas would ovulate without genital stimulation. To their surprise, he says, injecting seminal fluid into the female llamas’ bloodstream had “a very potent ovulatory effect.” Read full article.

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FDA Approves Drug to Reduce Risk of HIV

ASRM News and Research

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada (emtricitabine/tenofovir disoproxil fumarate), the first drug approved to reduce the risk of HIV infection in uninfected individuals who are at high risk of HIV infection and who may engage in sexual activity with HIV-infected partners. Truvada, taken daily, is to be used for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) in combination with safer sex practices to reduce the risk of sexually-acquired HIV infection in adults at high risk.

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Abortion Qualms on Morning After Pill May be Unfounded

ASRM News and Research

Labels inside every box of morning-after pills, drugs widely used to prevent pregnancy after sex, say they may work by blocking fertilized eggs from implanting in a woman’s uterus. Respected medical authorities, including the National Institutes of Health and the Mayo Clinic, have said the same thing on their Web sites.

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Gender Selection – How and Why?

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Gender selection is a fairly new option in the field of fertility treatment. Patients undergoing IVF can now choose whether to use a male or female embryo. Here are some frequently asked questions about this process.

What Technology is Used?

Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) is the only reliable method for selecting the gender of a child. Sperm sorting is sometimes used by couples in the hope of increasing the chances of conceiving a child of the desired sex. However, the effectiveness of this method is unproven lacking data from large, multicenter trials.

How Does PGD Work?

After an egg has been fertilized in an IVF dish, it is allowed to develop for 3 days. After this, a single cell is removed from the embryo. It is evaluated for Y chromosome (the male chromosome) markers. If these genetic markers are present, the embryo is male. If not, the embryo is female.

Is This Process Safe and Reliable?

The process of PGD does not prevent an embryo from developing normally. The results of the evaluation are available after about 2 days. This means the embryo is transferred to the mother’s womb on the 5th day instead of the 3rd day. This is still within the time frame for successful embryo transfer. This method of determining the sex of an embryo has been shown to be 99% accurate.

Why Might Patients Choose this Option?

Patients sometimes use gender selection if they already have children of one gender and wish to balance their family with a child of the opposite gender. Or, the family may have a history of genetic disorders that are passed down through the X chromosome. These recessive traits typically affect male children because they have only one X chromosome. Choosing to have a girl makes it unlikely that this disease will affect the child. Some patients simply prefer to have a child of a specific gender.

Are There Ethical Concerns about Gender Selection?

Some people feel that selection of non-essential characteristics like gender is not an appropriate use of medical technology. Others believe gender selection is an aspect of reproductive rights and parents should be allowed to make this decision. The use of this technology to prevent genetic disease or to provide family balancing is typically viewed as less controversial than other uses.

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The Journey to the Center of the Uterus

ASRM News and Research

There is very little know as to why just 1% of the 300 million sperms released by a man during sex manages to reach their partner’s uterus, while just a few dozen reach the egg. It is generally termed as the race of the fittest that out of millions of sperms only one will win the race and rest would perish.

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CDC – Fewer Teens Having Sex, More Using Contraception

ASRM News and Research

A survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that 56.7 percent of older teen girls had never had vaginal intercourse. That’s an increase of 16 percent since 1995 and reflects a steady downward trend in teen sex. Of those teens who had had sex, 59.8 percent were using what CDC considers “highly effective” forms of contraception, an even larger increase of 26 percent.