High rate of chlamydial infection seen in young adults in US

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About 4 percent of young adults in the US have Chlamydia trachomatis, a sexually transmitted infection, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The highest and lowest prevalence of chlamydial infection is found in black women and Asian men, respectively.

Dr. William C. Miller, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues used urine testing to determine the prevalence of chlamydial infection and gonorrhea in a nationally representative sample of 12,548 subjects between 18 and 26 years.

Overall, 4.19 percent of subjects had a chlamydial infection, 0.43 percent had a gonococcal infection, and 0.030 percent had both, the investigators report.

Consistent with previous reports, women (4.7 percent) were more likely to have chlamydial infection than were men (3.7 percent), the authors found.

Black women had the highest prevalence of infection, at 13.95 percent--and Asian men had the lowest rate, at 1.14 percent.

In terms of geographic regions, the highest rate--5.39 percent--was in the South, while the lowest was in the Northeast--2.39 percent.

The prevalence of gonorrhea was varied strongly by race. For blacks, the rate was 2.13 percent, whereas, for whites, the rate was just 0.10 percent.

“The high prevalence of chlamydial infection in both men and women suggests that current screening approaches that focus primarily on clinic-based testing of young women are inadequate,” the authors note.

“The reduction of disparities in the prevalence of both chlamydial and gonococcal infections across racial/ethnic groups must also be a priority,” they add.

SOURCE: Journal of the American Medical Association, May 12, 2004.

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