Texas abstinence-only high school struggling to deal with chlamydia epidemic

[eridani]

Another one for the No Shit Sherlock file.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/11/09/1447600/-Texas-abstinence-only-high-school-struggling-to-deal-with-chlamydia-epidemic

The superintendent of schools in Crane, Texas is rethinking the districts sexual education curriculum, after learning that 20 of the high schools 300 students have tested positive for chlamydia.

Jim Rummage told television station KFOR, "We do have an abstinence curriculum, and that evidently ain’t working. We need to do all we can, although it’s the parents’ responsibility to educate their kids on sexual education.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention isn't mincing any words, calling the outbreak a health issue of epidemic proportions.

Abstinence-only programs have been an enormous failure, despite heavy funding from the George W. Bush administration and conservative legislatures:

To date, 11 states have evaluated the impact of their abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. None has been shown to reduce teen sexual activity.

Virginity pledgers have found "loopholes" to keep their pledges intact—engaging in risky oral or anal sex—and neglecting to use condoms when they do begin to have vaginal intercourse, according to research from Peter Bearman at Columbia University.

A 2007 federally-funded evaluation of these programs found that youth in the control group were no more likely to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having sex, had a similar number of partners and had initiated sex at the same age.