Cardiac Patients’ Herbal Supplement Use Deserves More Careful Investigation

Abstract

lence rates, specifically in clinics where there are a lot of infections, it’s important to screen males and females annually,” said Gale Burstein, MD, MPH, associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “In our clinic in Buffalo we routinely screen the men, and we find a lot of chlamydia.” But Kathleen Tebb, PhD, of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, said controversy still brews around the idea of screening boys and men for chlamydia, especially in the current climate of resources stretched to their limits. In a study of 711 sexually active, asymptomatic adolescent boys who visited pediatric clinics in 10 geographic regions in Northern California, Tebb and her colleagues reported a chlamydia prevalence of 4%, which is similar to the overall prevalence rate in Anschuetz’s study of high school students (Tebb KP et al. J Adolesc Health. 2004; 34[3]:166-168). While overall prevalence may have been high enough to warrant screening in boys, Tebb said her study found wide geographic variations in prevalence. In regions where no infections in boys were reported, resources spent on routine screening would have been wasted. But geographic variations raise a chickenand-egg scenario: screening without knowing local prevalence may waste resources, but local prevalence cannot be determined without screening. Her work is politically neutral, but Tebb noted that public funding for sex education during the Bush administration focused on abstinence-only programs . Consequently, she said, funds were cut for more comprehensive programs that explain safer sex options and screening for disease. “This bigger national policy issue really hindered progress in this area at both the scientific and program implementation levels,” she said. Fortenberry of Indiana University is not optimistic that clinical recommendations will change anytime soon to include screening of boys and young men. But he said a larger issue looms: “There are some people who might argue that this is ongoing gender discrimination that still makes women bear a greater part of the burden of something that our entire society has to be interested in [for] our reproductive health.”