STDs in America: Collect 'Em All, Trade 'Em With Your Friends

STDs in America: Collect 'Em All, Trade 'Em With Your Friends

Every year has its resounding winners, and this year, the clap is the Slumdog Millionaire of burning sensations, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 STD Surveillance Report. But you can never rule out a cult classic, especially if it's French.

The CDC, by intensely scrutinizing everyone's funzones (Big Brother starts watching you right after Creepy Uncle stops) and pondering for a year, compiles annual reports tracking increases or decreases in particular sexually transmitted diseases (HIV is tracked separately; if you care, the number of HIV positive individuals are rising, but only because they're no longer doing bigots and denialists the courtesy of dying). While recent press panic has focused on the bump- and cancer-causing human papillomavirus as well as the timeless icon of slut-shaming herpes simplex virus-2, the 2007 report skims past these incurables.

Instead, it highlights our old friends, the bacteria. Chlamydia—the clap— and syphilis—the French Pox, have taken our penicillin and yet kept on penis illin'. And in a way, this is a beautiful thing; with retro being all but a national dogma, why not return to the simpler infections of yesteryear? As a nation of enterprising health educators may have succeeded in at least getting young people to play a little preliminary doctor and make sure there's no weeping sores, we can regress to a more innocent time when it merely hurts when you pee and then makes you infertile and possibly insane.

Of course, there's some sobering sociological findings, namely that the number of infected patients and the rates of increase in new cases are often markedly higher in certain racial groups (blacks have it worse), and that women tend to have it worse than men. From both public health and social justice perspectives, these are troubling findings. But for those willing to regard the urine sample cup as being half-full, we can be all but assured that no targetted action will be taken. After all, classism, racism, and sexism are the Volvo station wagon of American culture, and denial the warm blanket in its back seat, under which we can bang the stuffing out of each other, secure in the knowledge that we're not the kind of person who gets a disease.