Research says STD treatment falling behind

Would a safe-sex campaign developed to target black and Mexican-American women in Texas work in northwest London?

Could birth-control pills actually increase the risk of contracting the AIDS virus?

What's the best way to persuade men to get circumcised, which has been shown to significantly reduce the spread of AIDS?

Those are only some of the questions on the minds of more than 1,200 of the world's leading researchers on sexually transmitted diseases, who have gathered at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle this week.

Organizers say the joint meeting of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research and the World Congress of the International Union against Sexually Transmitted Infections comes at a time of both good news and bad news: Promising new therapies are on the horizon, but the global scourge of AIDS/HIV continues.

"We're falling behind faster and faster," said Dr. King Holmes, director of Center for AIDS and STD and chair of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington. For every HIV patient who begins treatment, six other people get infected with the virus, he said.

The Internet has become a popular gateway for risky sexual behavior among adolescents, researchers say. A sampling earlier this year of 142 Web profiles posted by teens age 16 and 17 on the popular social-networking site MySpace found that a fifth of them contained references to sexual activity.

And researchers who study sexually transmitted diseases continue to be frustrated by persistent perceptions that STDs are simply "a disease of promiscuity," said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, a UW associate professor of medicine who chaired the scientific organizing committee for the research conference, which ends today. So, funding for the prevention of such diseases is always scarce, Marrazzo said.

Still, both Holmes and Marrazzo say their field has made big strides since the International Society's first meeting, in 1977, when fewer than 50 people showed up.

Holmes said he is also heartened by aggressive public-health efforts in East Africa, Cambodia and the Caribbean that have succeeded in reducing some HIV infection rates.

Meanwhile, American teenagers are becoming more sexually responsible. Condom use among sexually active high-schoolers is up since 1991, and the percentage of high-schoolers who have ever had sex is down.

And some curable sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis and gonorrhea are on the decline among certain populations around the globe.

Still, in King County, reported gonorrhea cases in 2006 were at a 13-year high, according to the state Health Department. Chlamydia was the most common STD in Washington state, and syphilis infections are rising steadily.

Kyung Song: 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com