It is easy to overlook seniors when we see the dire numbers around STIs and teens, yet we remain at risk for sexually transmitted infections as we age.
To ensure quality sexual and reproductive health and address economic burdens, continued efforts to educate, screen, test, and treat for STDs is critical to our nation’s public health and well-being.
This week it became clear there are things more important to the Susan G. Komen Foundation–the fundraising giant that each year during breast cancer awareness month virtually swathes the United States in pink, a la Christo–than ensuring women are able to access exams for early detection of breast cancer. In a word: Politics.
Problems with cervical cancer screening practices are a major contributor to more than 4,000 women per year dying of this 100% prevantable cancer.
Indiana women: Your bodies are now officially political pawns. And Governor Daniels is calling check mate.
Nearly 15 years ago the Institutes of Medicine called for development of a national STD strategy to address the destructive links between STDs and HIV. To this day, it remains mostly unheeded.
Several complex and interconnected social and cultural factors have kept women particularly vulnerable to violence directed against them, all of them manifestations of unequal power relations between men and women. The acceptance of violence as a means by which to solve conflict as well as fear of and control over female independence and female sexuality are just some of the contributing factors that allow violence against women to persist. How are the public health and medical communities implicated in all of this? What can they do to address violence against women not just as a legal issue, but as a fundamental human rights health issue that requires medical attention, clinical care, and sustainable public health interventions?
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a growing public health concern in the United States, which has increased discussion about routine screening for IPV. But, are we really ready to implement this measure?
