THE BIRDS, THE BEES & THE STDS

NOW THAT we've absorbed the inital shock, the stunning news that one out of four American girls between the ages of 14 and 19 has one or more sexually transmitted diseases leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions.

That stat, from a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, makes it clear what a lot of young people are doing in their spare time.

But what are they doing during school hours when they are supposed to be learning about personal hygiene and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases?

And what is going on in their homes where they are supposed to learn the facts of life, one of which is that unprotected sex is hazardous to your health and your reproductive system?

The headline statistic is enough to stop you in your tracks. But a closer look reveals an even bleaker picture. One in seven infected girls had multiple STDs. African-American girls were more than twice as likely to have an STD.

Clearly, this alarming incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and high rates of teen pregnancies in America reflect a breakdown of parental influence . . . to say nothing of the failure of a $1 billion abstinence-only program favored by President Bush. Parents of teenage girls grapple with a tough choice; they may worry that urging girls to use condoms encourages sexual promiscuity, even though it's their daughters who carry the burden of contraception.

Our choice as a society is much simpler. We need to make sure that every pre-teen in public school - girls and boys - is enrolled in a sex-education course that provides facts, not dogma.

On positive note, the Philadelphia Health Department has one of the best STD screening programs operating in a school district. Health Department clinicians have tested 84,000 teens public and charter schools.

They have treated 98.8 percent of the 4,100 infected students and 782 of their partners in the five years that in-school screenings have been conducted. They don't dispense condoms in schools but they do at district health centers at no cost.

District Health Center No. 1, at Broad and Lombard streets, screens for STDs at its walk-in STD clinic. The District Health Center at Episcopal Hospital at 100 E. Lehigh Ave., offers STD screening and condoms.

In a perfect world, we could tell our children to avoid sex until they reach adulthood. In the world as we know it, we have to tell them to protect themselves, and us, from an STD epidemic. *