http://www.health.am/sex/ 2012-02-08T21:55:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/smiling-women-seen-as-sexy/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/smiling-women-seen-as-sexy/ Guys, want to look sexy and get the girl? Don’t smile too much. Look brooding or show a bit of shame instead. Women, ignore that advice. Women find happy men less sexually attractive than those with expressions that show pride or hint that they have done wrong and know it, according to Canadian researchers. The study published online Tuesday in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion showed pictures of the opposite sex to both men and women. Participants were then asked for their initial reactions on sexual attractiveness based the expressions they saw. Sexual Health News 2011-05-25T14:48:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/eczema-tied-to-higher-impotence-risk/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/eczema-tied-to-higher-impotence-risk/ Men who have the allergic skin condition eczema may have a higher risk of erectile dysfunction than other men, a new study finds. The study, of nearly 4,000 Taiwanese men with ED, hints at a connection between eczema and impotence. And the researchers suggest that doctors “be more attentive to sexual complaints” from men with eczema—known medically as atopic dermatitis. But an allergy expert not involved in the study said that while the findings are “interesting,” there are too many limitations to know whether eczema actually raises the risk of ED. Sexual Health News 2012-02-08T22:55:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/new-vaccine-recommendations/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/new-vaccine-recommendations/ Federal health experts are now recommending that all boys be routinely vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV. The vaccine already has been recommended for girls and young women since 2006 largely to prevent cervical cancer. But health authorities never expressly encouraged the vaccine for young boys, saying only that they “could” receive it to protect against genital warts and certain cancers and to help prevent the spread of HPV. In releasing a new immunization schedule on Thursday - published in The Annals of Internal Medicin - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used much stronger language, explicitly recommending HPV vaccination for boys 11 to 12 years old and catch-up vaccination for those 13 to 21. Sexual Health News 2012-02-04T11:00:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/a-lonely-heart-can-make-you-sick/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/a-lonely-heart-can-make-you-sick/ Newly divorced middle aged women are more vulnerable to contract HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, according to Christopher Coleman, PhD, MPH, RN, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, because they tend to let their guard down with new sexual partners and avoid using protection since they are unafraid of getting pregnant. Additionally, as aging occurs, physiological changes due to menopause such as the thinning of vaginal walls make it more susceptible for a woman to contract a virus. Medications that would be used to treat an STD or HIV become hard for a woman to tolerate because an aging body metabolizes medications differently. “There is a knowlege gap with women knowing what the physiological changes associated with menopause are,” said Dr. Coleman. “There is very little research on this subject and society and the government don’t talk about it, but these high risk sexual behaviors need to be addressed because the rate of HIV positive middle aged women is inscreasing.” Sexual Health News 2012-02-04T10:30:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/sonicating-sperm-male-contraception/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/sonicating-sperm-male-contraception/ The ideal male contraceptive would be inexpensive, reliable, and reversible. It would need to be long acting but have few side effects. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology used commercially available therapeutic ultrasound equipment to reduce sperm counts of male rats to levels which would result in infertility in humans. Ultrasound’s potential as a male contraceptive was first reported nearly 40 years ago. However the equipment used is now outdated and no longer available. Researchers from the Department of Pediatrics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine used these experiments as a starting point to see if modern ultrasound equipment usually used for physical therapy could be used as a male contraceptive. The team led by James Tsuruta found that by rotating high frequency (3MHz) ultrasound around the testes they were able to cause uniform depletion of germ cells throughout the testes. The best results were seen using two sessions consisting of 15 minutes ultrasound, two days apart. Saline was used to provide conduction between the ultrasound transducer and skin, and the testes were warmed to 37 degrees centigrade. Together this reduced sperm to a Sperm Count Index of zero (3 million motile sperm per cauda epididymis).  Sexual Health News 2012-01-30T09:46:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/oral-hpv-infection-hpv-related/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/oral-hpv-infection-hpv-related/ Oral HPV infection is more common among men than women, explaining why men are more prone than women to develop an HPV related head and neck cancer, according to a study presented at the Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancer Symposium. Human papillomavirus, or HPV, has recently been linked to some types of head and neck cancer that are becoming more prominent in the United States, mostly among men. Patients infected with oral HPV type 16 have a 14 times greater risk of developing one of these cancers, which usually form on the tonsils and at the back of the tongue. The correlation between HPV and oral cancer was only established in 2007, so it is not well understood how to detect or prevent these cancers. Sexual Health News 2012-01-27T12:34:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/los-angeles-mandates-porn-stars/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/los-angeles-mandates-porn-stars/ Porn stars in Los Angeles will be legally required to wear condoms during film shoots after the city council voted on Tuesday to mandate their use, despite a threat by skin flick producers to leave town over the requirement. The move comes amid persistent questions about how to enforce the health measure, which backers say will protect performers in the multibillion-dollar porn industry from contracting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Producers complain the sight of a condom in a sex scene turns off consumers of their videos. The Los Angeles City Council voted 9-1 on Tuesday to give final approval to the measure, proposed after the AIDS Healthcare Foundation qualified an initiative for the ballot that would have asked voters in June to mandate condoms at porn shoots as a condition of obtaining film permits. Sexual Health News 2012-01-19T10:19:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/some-girls-overestimate-hpv-vaccine-protection/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/some-girls-overestimate-hpv-vaccine-protection/ Some adolescent girls who get the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer wrongly think they no longer need to practice safe sex, U.S. researchers said on Monday. The study, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, shows the need for better education about the vaccines and their limitations. Merck’s Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix vaccines protect against strains of the humanpapilloma virus or HPV that cause cervical cancer. Gardasil also protects against some strains of the virus that cause genital warts. Sexual Health News 2012-01-03T18:49:01-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/group-sex-among-adolescents/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/group-sex-among-adolescents/ One in 13 teenage girls, aged 14 to 20, reported having a group-sex experience, with those young women more likely to have been exposed to pornography and childhood sexual abuse than their peers, according to a new study led by a Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher. In a study published in the Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Emily Rothman, associate professor of community health sciences at BUSPH, and colleagues surveyed 328 females who had utilized a Boston-area community or school-based health clinic, to explore whether they had ever had sex with multiple partners—either consensual or forced. The authors call this sexual experience “multi-person sex,” or MPS, in order to underscore that it refers to any group sex experience on a continuum from gang rape to sex parties. Of the 7.3 percent who said they had group sex, more than half reported being pressured to engage in the group-sex situation. Forty-five percent reported a lack of condom use by a male participant during the most recent group-sex encounter. Participants with MPS experience also were more likely to report cigarette smoking, dating violence victimization, or ever being diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease, the study found. In addition, those who had seen pornography in the past month were approximately five times as likely as those who had not seen pornography to report ever having had a group-sex experience.  Sexual Health News 2011-12-16T20:48:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/unwanted-online-sexual-exposures/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/unwanted-online-sexual-exposures/ A new study from the University of New Hampshire Crimes against Children Research Center finds declines in two kinds of youth Internet sexual encounters of great concern to parents: unwanted sexual solicitations and unwanted exposure to pornography. The researchers suspect that greater public awareness may have been, in part, what has helped. The study found that the percentage of youth receiving unwanted online sexual requests declined from 13 percent in 2005 to 9 percent in 2010. Youth experiencing unwanted pornography exposure declined from 34 percent to 23 percent over the same period. On the other hand, youth reports of online harassment increased slightly from 2005, up from 9 percent to 11 percent.  Sexual Health News 2011-12-15T20:32:04-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/alcohol-can-lead-to-unsafe-sex/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/alcohol-can-lead-to-unsafe-sex/ A new study has found that alcohol consumption directly impacts a person’s intention to have unsafe sex. In other words, the more you drink, the stronger becomes your intention to engage in unsafe sex. Unsafe sex is the most important pathway to HIV infection, and it is a main risk factor for the global burden of disease. Despite this knowledge, and substantial efforts to prevent unsafe sex, HIV incidence in most high income countries (such as the US or the UK) has not changed over the past decade. In some cases, it has even increased. Finding better ways to prevent unsafe sex is thus a major goal of public health efforts for HIV/AIDS prevention. Alcohol consumption, especially heavy drinking, has long been associated with HIV incidence. However, there have been doubts about the cause-and-effect relationship. Researchers weren’t sure if alcohol consumption caused HIV via unsafe sex, or whether certain personality traits in individuals, such as sensation-seeking or a disposition to risky behaviour in general, would lead to both alcohol use and unsafe sex. The study, published in the January issue of the journal Addiction, summarizes the results of 12 experiments that tested this cause-and-effect relationship in a systematic way. After pooling the results, the researchers found that alcohol consumption affects decision-making, and that this impact rises with the amount of alcohol consumed. The more alcohol that participants consumed, the higher their willingness to engage in unsafe sex. Sexual Health News 2011-12-12T09:13:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/drinking-tied-to-sexual-assault-risk/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/drinking-tied-to-sexual-assault-risk/ Many young women who steer clear of alcohol while they’re in high school may change their ways once they go off to college. And those who take up binge drinking may be at relatively high risk of sexual assault, according to a study in the January issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs. The college years are famously associated with drinking. But little has been known about how young women change their high school drinking habits once they start college. So for the new study, researchers followed 437 young women from high school graduation through freshman year of college. They found that of women who had never drunk heavily in high school (if at all), nearly half admitted to binge drinking at least once by the end of their first college semester. What’s more, binge drinking was linked to students’ risk of sexual victimization - regardless of what their drinking habits had been in high school.  Sexual Health News 2011-12-08T08:48:04-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/referendum-on-porn-star-condom-use/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/referendum-on-porn-star-condom-use/ Voters in the city of Los Angeles, home to the nation’s porn industry, could be asked next year whether condoms should be required in adult film shoots to cut down on sexually transmitted diseases. The AIDS Healthcare Foundation said on Monday it had submitted about 71,000 signatures, surpassing the required number of 41,000, for a ballot initiative that could go before voters in June 2012. If the signatures are certified by city officials and a vote is held on the measure, residents would be asked whether to force Los Angeles officials to require the use of condoms on porn sets as a condition for film permits. Sexual Health News 2011-12-06T19:09:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/germany-offers-therapy-to-child-sex-abuse-victims/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/germany-offers-therapy-to-child-sex-abuse-victims/ Germany will offer every victim of child sex abuse 10,000 euros ($13,000) worth of therapy from a 100 million euro fund set up to address a scandal centered on Catholic schools. The statute of limitations for sexual abuse crimes will be extended to 30 years from just three. Victims will not receive government compensation under the plan. The fund is the result of 18 months of consultation between the government, victims and Church officials. The government said the consultation group heard from more than 20,000 victims of abuse with many cases dating back several decades. Sexual Health News 2011-12-01T19:35:00-08:00 http://www.health.am/sex/more/laptop-wi-fi-said-to-nuke-sperm/ http://www.health.am/sex/more/laptop-wi-fi-said-to-nuke-sperm/ The digital age has left men’s nether parts in a squeeze, if you believe the latest science on semen, laptops and wireless connections. In a report in the venerable medical journal Fertility and Sterility, Argentinian scientists describe how they got semen samples from 29 healthy men, placed a few drops under a laptop connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and then hit download. Four hours later, the semen was, eh, well-done. A quarter of the sperm were no longer swimming around, for instance, compared to just 14 percent from semen samples stored at the same temperature away from the computer. Sexual Health News 2011-11-29T08:30:00-08:00