Why we should save our STD clinics.

摘要

In their editorial published in the April issue of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Golden and Kemdt present data from a sample of US Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) clinics, including ours, that suggest that these clinics may be more important in the control of sexually transmitted infections, particularly syphilis and gonorrhea, than is generally thought.1 To further inform the discussion on why we should save our STD clinics, we submit here some findings of additional analyses of the Denver STD data that we provided for the editorial.The most striking point from these analyses is the discrepancy found when stratifying by gender. First, of all reported chlamydia cases in the City and County of Denver in 2009, 69% were among women, compared to 44% for gonorrhea, and 7% for syphilis. This makes sense since, as a result of practice guidelines women are more likely to be screened for chlamydia. However, it also indicates that trends in reported chlamydia cases dispropor-tionally reflect the testing experiences among women. Indeed, when investigating the origin of case reports, we found that for men, 46% of chlamydia cases, 54% of gonorrhea cases, and 24% of syphilis cases were reported from the Denver STD clinic, compared to only 13%, 20%, and 12% for women, respectively. These data have an important corollary in the fact that men consistently comprise over 60% of the visits at the Denver clinic.