<strike> Mississexxi </strike>
2009-08-03 01:27:35.998012+00 by
meuon
1 comments
Good article about state funded religious centric bad sex education, pro-abstinence, little actual education.
This sums it up nicely:
"Neither Mahan nor any of the speakers offered information on what to do if abstinence fails. Did he talk about proper use of condoms or birth control? No, but he did make the offhand and scientifically unfounded comment that condoms are “pieces of rubber that deteriorate in your back pocket. They only work some of the time.” But the medical community considers an 87 to 98 percent effectiveness rate in preventing sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy as more than “some of the time.”"
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#Comment Re: made: 2009-08-03 16:42:09.919664+00 by:
m
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What in life is 100% effective (or safe)? Not crossing the street, taking a bath or even getting an apple out of a refrigerator.
One way of measuring how contagious a disease is, and how effective countermeasures are is by the length of the infection chain. That is how many other individuals are likely to be infected by a person who has the disease. With a chain length of less than one, then any outbreak of the disease is likely to die out. With a chain length greater than one, an outbreak will continue to grow until the chain length becomes smaller than one, which happens for any number of reasons, often only because after a while the number of susceptible individuals gets smaller.
Posit that condoms provide 90% effectiveness against STDs, then even a disease that has a rather contagious chain length of unprotected sex 9, becomes a self limiting chain length of 0.9. I don't know the chain lengths for GC, syphilis and other STDs. I strongly doubt if any of them exceed 10, and thus universal condom use amongst uncommitted partners would keep outbreaks self limiting.