The study report — titled as “Are New Yorkers Having Safe Sex?” released by the NY Department of Health and Mental Hygiene asserts that 40% of New Yorkers with multiple partners didn't use a condom the last time they had sex.
The report, which came just a few months after the city warned about an alarming increase in H.I.V. infections among young gay men, articulates that over one-third — 36 percent — of New York City men who have sex with other men and have had five or more sex partners within the past year do not consistently use condoms.
According to the study, based on a telephone survey of 10,000 residents conducted by the department’s Bureau of Epidemiology Services, 11 percent of New Yorkers, or 610,000 adults, reported having more than one partner in the past year, and men were three times more likely than women to report multiple partners (17 percent vs. 6 percent).
The study found that young adults (18 to 24 years old) were four times as likely as older adults (45 and older) — 25 percent vs. 6 percent — to report having multiple partners. It found that Asian adults were less likely to report having multiple sex partners than any other ethnic or racial group.
The study articulated that New Yorkers with same-sex partners were nearly three times as likely (33 percent versus 13 percent) as those with opposite-sex partners to report having more than one partner in the past year. It found that 5% of New Yorkers who are married or in steady relationships say they’ve had two or more partners in the past year. It disclosed that men who have sex with men were more likely to have five or more sex partners in the past year than men who have sex with only women (23 percent vs. 6 percent).
A new study released by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention articulates that HIV positive rates have been increasing among the young black gay men; HIV has been rising at a rate of 12 percent each year since 2001. The annual increase rate, at 15 percent, was even higher among the African-American gay men aged between 13 to 24.
"Its clear from the report that half of the American AIDS epedemic is occuring among a few percent of the adult population," says Dr. Ronald Stall, an epidemiologist and professor of public health at the University of Pittsburgh.
Phil Wilson, the head of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, says, "The figures clearly indicate that it's and epidemic out of control and no concrete steps have been taken to prevent the spread of the infection."
According to the C.D.C. report, Sex among men accounted for more than 97,000 new diagnosis over the six years, while on the other hand the diagnosis attributed to high-risk heterosexual contact and injection-drug use, declined annually by 4.4 percent and 9.5 percent, respectively.
The increase in the infection rates are also attributed to the lack of access to information. Because of the strong new treatments, some men believe that it's a less severe disease than it was once. "If you talk to some of these young men, they say, 'If I do get the infection, I will simply take the blue pill or the pink pill, like my friend," Ron Simmons says.
A recent study focusing on sexual practices of U.S. teens has rejected the notion that teens in United States engage in oral sex rather than intercourse to maintain "technical virginity”. Previous studies in 2002 - 2005 had articulated that teens engage in oral sex in order to preserve their "technical virginity," but, the new study that falsified the previous studies was published in the Journal of Adolescent Health; the study was based on a survey conducted on 2,271 females and males age 15 to 19.
According to the study, 55 percent of the teens said they had engaged in oral sex but that this practice was far more common among those who also had engaged in vaginal sex. Teens admitted that they began vaginal and oral sex at roughly the same time - by six months after first vaginal intercourse, 82 percent had also engaged in oral sex.
In a statement, Laura Lindberg of the Guttmacher Institute in New York, who led the study, said, “There is a widespread belief that teens engage in nonvaginal forms of sex, especially oral sex, as a way to be sexually active while still claiming that, technically, they are virgins.”
"However, our research shows that this supposed substitution of oral sex for vaginal sex is largely a myth. There is no good evidence that teens who have not had intercourse engage in oral sex with a series of partners," Lindberg said.
The study funded by the Guttmacher Institute studies sexual and reproductive health issues found that about one in 10 of the teens had engaged in anal sex. These teens were far more likely to have also engaged in vaginal sex. The study also revealed that teens of white ethnicity and higher socioeconomic status were the most likely to have had anal or oral sex.