Sex Kill 30,000/Maggie Gallagher

That's the word from Eugene Volokh (as www.volokh.com):

" An interesting article, S.H. Ebrahim, M.T. McKenna & J.S. Marks, Sexual Behaviour: Related Adverse Health Burden in the United States, Sexually Transmitted Infections, vol. 81, pp. 38-40 (2005), reports that sexually transmitted diseases were responsible for nearly 30,000 deaths in the U.S. in 1998. A third of the deaths were among women, and two thirds among men. By way of comparison, there were about 44,000 car accidents, a titch over 30,000 suicides, a little under 18,000 homicides, and a bit over 30,000 total firearms deaths (including suicides, homicides, and the few accidents). Three quarters of the deaths were from HIV, but nearly 5000 were from cervical cancer, which seems to be generally caused by some strains of human papilloma virus, and nearly 2000 were caused by sexually transmitted hepatitis and hepatitis-caused liver cancer. (The study purported to take into account the fact that not all hepatitis is sexually transmitted.) There were also over 100 deaths from syphilis and fewer than 10 from gonorrhoea (presumably from the very rare gonorrhoea-caused heart disease), but apparently modern antibiotics have done a great deal to limit death and serious illness caused in the U.S. by bacterial sexually transmitted diseases.

The study also reported that sexually transmitted disease causes some 600,000 cases of infertility per year (overwhelmingly among women); and of course hepatitis, cervical cancer, liver cancer, and HIV can be quite painful and disabling even when they don't cause death. . ."

That's ten times as many people killed by sex as by Islamic terrorists. . .

(Warning: tongue-in-cheek).
posted by maggie at 8:59 PM VOTE

1 Comments:

At 10/25/2005 1:00 PM,  John Howard said...

600,000 women rendered infertile every year? And, once infertile, they stay infertile. I wonder how many women have sex for the first time every year? That's got to be a good percentage of them. I'll guess that 6 million women have sex for the first time every year, so there's like a one in ten chance that a woman will become infertile by not abstaining until marriage. That's very high risk, isn't it?
But I bet there are people who don't care, or who think it is even GOOD that those women will now have to "plan" and "want" their baby, and those women's marriages are now equal to lesbian and gay couples that won't have their own natural children.

 

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