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One in four girls ages 14 to 19 is infected with at least one of four common diseases. Among black girls in the study, almost half were infected.

in 2003-4

By far the most common of the four STDs was the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which infected 18 percent of the girls. Chlamydia infected 4 percent, trichomoniasis - a common parasite - 2.5 percent, and genital herpes 2 percent.

Mentioning teens and sex in the same sentence, if you're not condemning them, often has negative consequences. Judith Levine, whose book Harmful to Minors (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) argued that children and teens can enjoy sexual pleasure safely, received death threats, and Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was let go in 1994 after she advocated that masturbation be taught in schools.

"Kids aren't getting comprehensive sex education that covers everything, including abstinence, safer sex, and sexual orientation. Most curricula don't acknowledge that kids want to have sex or address those desires reasonably and logically. Libraries have filters on Internet sites, so kids can't get into basic teen education sites."

"The adolescents I work with are full of myths about sex. I've heard everything from 'birth control makes you sterile' to 'you can't get pregnant if you have sex right before or after your period' to 'condoms don't protect you from HIV and other STDs.' "

Prostitution is deemed unacceptable in Malawi but the sex trade continues to thrive. Large numbers of women, especially young ones, are seen loitering around street corners, near hotels, bars and other entertainment places.

She has not been brave enough to go for an HIV test yet. The 2006 Malawi Behavior Surveillance Survey indicates that up to 70 percent of sex workers are HIV positive – this is the highest rate being faced by one group of people in the country – the national prevalence rate for Malawi is 14 percent. AIDS is Malawi’s second leading cause of death after malaria

Wochi says she was forced into prostitution by abject poverty. “I found sex work lucrative and I thought it was a very easy way of making money.”

Microbicides have long been high on the wish list of grass-roots activists, who see them as the most promising way to prevent AIDS for heterosexual women at high risk of infection from unfaithful husbands or partners, especially in Asia and Africa.

Yet to date, research related to their development represents only 2 percent of all AIDS spending by the National Institutes of Health

One mathematical model, which focused on Johannesburg, South Africa, predicted that if 75 percent of area residents were to use a 40-percent-effective microbicide in half of the sexual encounters in which they didn't use condoms, the local incidence of HIV infection would drop by 9 percent. That may not sound like much, but across countries and continents, similar percentages could translate into millions of saved lives.

There was a 6% rise in sex infections in the UK in 2007 compared to 2006

Half of the total were in people aged 16-24, despite the fact they represent just one in eight of the population

Young people still aren't getting the education and the services they need to manage their health and relationships

While this portrait of Iranian sexual experimentation may be shocking on its surface, it has grown familiar to most people who have visited Iran or followed cultural developments there in the past decade. Less well known is that, for all their promiscuity and seeming sophistication, many of these young Iranians suffer from a lack of sexual education and resources that fits the official culture of pious abstinence rather than the actual one of looseness and risk. The birth control method of choice among Mahdavi's informants is withdrawal. Women who take the pill frequently lack the most basic information and take it only erratically, depriving themselves of almost all of its effect. Condoms are considered so filthy and embarrassing that even people who share florid details about their sex lives with Mahdavi blush at their mention, and no one wants to be seen requesting them at a pharmacy. AIDS, educated young Iranians tell Mahdavi, is transmitted through visits to the dentist or hairdresser, and other STDs come only from a certain unsavory sort of woman. While wealthy women can obtain abortions--illegal in most cases but common, thanks to poor contraception--from sympathetic doctors at vast expense, poorer women acquire on the black market pills or injections meant for animals. Mahdavi went to a back street where dealers sell these medications, just to see how easily they could be acquired. A dealer sold her a vial of pills without the least instruction on what to do with them. Physicians she interviewed told her that they see a great many women seriously injured or rendered infertile by self-administered abortions meant for animals.

Yet there is good news in Mahdavi's study. Close to the ground, where it counts, Iranian doctors, parents, educators and even institutions are bending to the forces of change. For example, since 2000 the Islamic Republic has required Iranians who seek marriage licenses to attend state-administered classes on family planning. One that Mahdavi attended in Tehran's central business district sounds perfectly appalling. A chador-clad woman shrilly lectures a room of gum-snapping, nail-filing, indifferent young women, offering the following counsel: "You must always be ready for your husband's sexual needs. If perchance he is watching a football game on television, you should be resting to prepare yourself, or else preparing your bed for the evening. If you should feel overcome by fatigue yourself, make sure always to ask your husband, 'Is there anything else you need from me?' or 'Would you like to have me later?' before retiring."

But then Mahdavi attends another such class, this time in the city's north, in the upscale shopping district near the Tajrish bazaar. This class covers disease transmission, contraception, fertility, mental health, marital relations and even female sexual pleasure. The teachers wear the less forbidding hijab--head scarf and fitted thigh-length coat--common among their students, and the women attending these classes, Mahdavi reports, confide freely to the teachers about their relationships and their sex lives. Here, and in her chapter about the older generation's response to the sexual revolution, Mahdavi shows us a society beginning to shake off its denial and rigidity out of the sheer necessity of serving the burgeoning needs of its young--a generation of adults who have either grown sympathetic to young people's yearnings or, like Mrs. Erami, recognize that they risk greater losses than they can bear.