TB testing at Colonel Mitchell Paige Middle School in La Quinta, which was conducted after a person there was suspected of having the disease, so far has turned up no active TB infections. Six persons did have positive skin test results, said Barbara Cole, director of Disease Control for the Riverside County Department of Public Health. “Thus far with the results I have, I have no indication of any additional problems,” Cole said. Results from about half of the 256 people referred to testing, however, were still pending. She said persons with a positive skin test but a negative chest X-ray will be given antibiotics to prevent the dormant infection from developing.

The youth advocacy group Teens With a Purpose will host a series of peer-led workshops in the coming weeks titled “I Am Hear.” The sessions employ entertainment, games, and music to explore the dangers of unsafe sex, dating violence, and unhealthy relationships. The program uses a CDC-designed curriculum, “Choose Respect.”

Deirdre Love, the group’s founder and director, said the goal is to reach out to adolescents as young as 11 to steer them away from dangerous behaviors. For older teens, the sessions include tips on making positive choices.

More than 100 people attended the recent “I Am Hear” program at Norview Community Center. A game similar to musical chairs, with the chairs representing sexual partners and diseases like herpes and HIV, helped teach about the risk of STDs. Teen facilitators explained the symptoms and how abstinence and healthy sexual behaviors can help prevent infection.

To teach about respect, a mock “American Idol” skit included judges who were overly cruel, and audience members laughed hysterically. “Let’s have a moment of truth,” said teen facilitator Rechea Wainfield. “Do you insult people purposefully?” The audience fell silent. “If you say yes, then you have been abusive,” he said. That message hit home with sixth-grader Tyrique Jenkins: “I learned that you have to give respect to get it.”

The next “I Am Hear” program will be held May 13 at the Huntersville Community Center, 830 Goff St. For more information, visit http://www.twpthemovement.org, or telephone 757-503-1608.

Acknowledging that searching the World Wide Web for information about sexually transmitted infections is common, the authors carried out the current study to determine which Internet sites offer STI testing and to obtain information about the services and their validity.

The researchers used Internet search engines to collect information from the sites about STI testing services, the types of tests offered, and their costs. Business functions regarding consent and return of results also were investigated. Attempts to contact the services were made by telephone, mail, e-mail, and “contact us” links. Team members ordered test kits from six commercial sites and one public health site. The test kits’ accuracy for detecting chlamydia and gonorrhea was evaluated.

Twenty-seven US and international Internet sites offering STI self-collection kits and services were identified. Tests were offered for gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, HIV, herpes, hepatitis, trichomonas, mycoplasma, and gardnerella.

“All attempts to administer the survey yielded unsatisfactory results,” the authors wrote. “After sending the survey by mail/e-mail to all the sites, four responded, two with the survey. Six Web sites appeared invalid based on non-deliverable e-mails and returned letters. The remainder did not respond.”

Seven test kits were ordered; results were obtained from five kits. Two Web sites that were sent mocked urine specimens never provided results. The two “do-it-yourself” test kits yielded false-negative results. Correct positive results were obtained from two mailed-in urine samples. Correct positive results were obtained from the public health site’s kit.

“The Internet STI testing sites were difficult to contact and demonstrated unwillingness to answer consumer-specific questions,” the authors concluded. “Test accuracy varied, with home tests having poor accuracy and mail-in specimens demonstrating high accuracy.”

Merck & Co. recently began advertising its Gardasil human papillomavirus vaccine for boys to prevent genital warts. The vaccine prevents two HPV types associated with 90 percent of genital wart cases and two types linked to about 70 percent of cervical cancer cases. Most males who carry HPV never have symptoms, although HPV also has been linked to rare anal and penile cancers. Gardasil is approved for males ages nine to 26.

Gurnee, Ill., mom Dawn Delott said she likes “the fairness of it” but prefers a holistic approach whenever possible. “How do you know how safe the vaccine is, because it is so new?” asked Delott, who has an eight-year-old daughter and a son age seven. “You should be teaching your kids about abstinence,” said Aria Wasil of Highland Park, Ill., who doubts she will vaccinate her six-year-old son when he is older. Many also question the price of Gardasil – about $390 for the three-shot series.

In a 2009 study recently published in Pediatrics, nearly one in eight parents said they had refused at least one immunization recommended by their pediatrician. Most commonly declined was the HPV vaccine, by 56 percent of parents. More than half of the 1,552 respondents surveyed online said they worried about serious side effects from vaccines, especially new ones.

Fewer than 20 percent of females ages 13-17 have received all three HPV shots, said Dr. Tina Tan, an infectious-disease specialist at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago and a member of Merck’s HPV male advisory board. “If you could vaccinate 100 percent of the females, you wouldn’t have to [vaccinate boys],” she said. “But we are not even close.”

On Tuesday in Hanoi at the 18th meeting of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Nguyen Thien Nhan said his nation needs more international support to fight TB. Nhan credited the union for helping create more equity in access to health care services and a sense of shared responsibility among nations to combat the disease. About 150,000 Vietnamese – a large number of whom are females in the southern region – are diagnosed with TB each year, according to the World Health Organization.

A Calvary Day School student’s diagnosis with active TB has prompted plans to test the student’s household members, along with about 160 students, for the disease. Testing will be conducted Friday morning at the school, said Ralph Finnegan, headmaster. A letter about the situation was mailed to all parents, while the students deemed most at risk and in need of testing were given a separate letter at an assembly Tuesday. “These are individuals who have close, prolonged contact,” said Dr. Diane Weems, medical director of the Coastal Health District. “So we’re most worried, obviously, about family and household contacts and classmates who sat in the same classroom.” There is no connection between the student and a Chatham County jail inmate diagnosed with TB last week, Weems said. The county sees 10 to 15 active TB cases annually; at any given time, about 100 county residents are receiving treatment for latent TB infection. The Calvary student is in treatment and is expected to make a full recovery.

Two bills intended to protect patients from dangerous health care workers have advanced in the Colorado Legislature. The measures – by Reps. Debbie Benefield (D-Arvada/Westminster) and Sara Gagliardi (D-Arvada) – were filed in response to the case of Kristen Diane Parker, a surgical technician whose drug-theft and needle-swap scheme potentially exposed thousands of patients to her hepatitis C infection. Parker is now serving a 30-year prison sentence. The bills seek to help medical facilities avoid hiring surgical technicians with a criminal background or a history of jeopardizing patient safety. HB 1414 passed the House and advances to the Senate; HB 1415 passed the House Tuesday in an initial voice vote.

In June, officials with the Peoria City/County Health Department will act as facilitators at a community forum to discuss the county’s high STD rate among teens and young adults. Peoria is among the top five counties for chlamydia and gonorrhea reports among Illinois teens and young adults, said Greg Chance, the department’s administrator. Most cases are in residents ages 15-24, and in the city one out of every 16 teenagers has an STD.

“Hopefully, we can begin to peel the layers of the onion of the contributing factors leading up to the incidence of the rate we are experiencing,” Chance said. “We need to talk about sexual health in Peoria County and also the high teen pregnancy rate, so we as a community can determine what we want to do.”

“I’m not confident those kinds of discussions have opened up previously, especially with such a lightning rod issue as sexual health,” said Chance. “There are very strong feelings in the community about it, and we believe the first step is open and frank dialogue beginning in everybody’s household between parents and children; parents and schools; the faith community; and the medical community.”

Virtually eliminated in China 50 years ago, syphilis is now the most commonly reported communicable disease in the country’s largest city, Shanghai, researchers said today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Sex workers and men who have sex with men (MSM) are disproportionately represented among syphilis cases in China, in part because stigma “discourages them from obtaining needed care,” wrote lead author Dr. Joseph Tucker, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and colleagues. At least one-third of MSM in China are married, “and the transmission of syphilis to their wives and then children is an important consideration.”

China’s economic boom also has provided more businessmen and migrant laborers with the opportunity to purchase sex while away from home. “No other country has seen such a precipitous increase in reported syphilis in the penicillin era,” according to the report.

While syphilis can be cured with penicillin, many people never develop specific symptoms and so remain undiagnosed for years.

“In 2008, an average of more than one baby per hour was born with congenital syphilis in China, for a total of 9,480 cases; the rate had increased by a factor of 12 during the previous five years,” the authors wrote. In the absence of mandatory screening for the STD among pregnant women, the rate of mother-to-child transmission has exploded from seven cases per 100,000 live births to 57 per 100,000 between 2003 and 2008, Tucker said.

“The damage is irreversible,” said Dr. Connie Osborne, a senior HIV advisor at the World Health Organization in China. “Prevention of maternal syphilis combined with routine screening of pregnant women and early treatment of neonatal syphilis can prevent most, if not all, cases.”

Community- and government-based rapid screening and testing at nontraditional sites, such as at saunas, entertainment and commercial sex venues, needs to be sustained, taken up more systematically, and linked to HIV programs, the authors suggested.

“Government programs have already laid the foundation for change by helping to introduce syphilis testing at nontraditional sites and allowing the development of advocacy organizations,” the authors wrote. “But broader recognition of [STDs] as a public health problem, renewed financial commitment from the government, and technical input from advocacy organizations are imperative if syphilis is to be controlled and eliminated once again.”

The commentary, “Syphilis and Social Upheaval in China,” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine (2010;362(18):1658-1661).

New Brunswick plans to expand its human papillomavirus vaccination program to reach those girls who may have missed getting the shots last year. Provincial health resources had to be drawn away from the program to mobilize against pandemic H1N1 influenza. At least partly as a result, just half of eligible school girls age 12 that year received the HPV series.

Pandemic flu “meant that we had to try and identify where we had to train staff to deliver the mass clinics across the province,” said Paul Van Buynder, New Brunswick’s chief medical officer of health. “One of the things we could safely delay was the human papillomavirus vaccine for 12-year-old girls.”

In the fall, the province will continue offering the vaccine to 12-year-olds and will target 13-year-olds in a catch-up program. Health officials are considering whether to include boys in a future HPV program.

“Over the next 12 months, we’ll be looking at both vaccines [Gardasil and Cervarix] and the data and it may well be that in the future, we offer this to both boys and girls,” Van Buynder said.