Letter to MAP Speaker

I'm writing a letter to the speaker in Health. If I remember correctly, her email was mapteacher@yahoo.com, right? If anybody has any suggestions for this letter, comment.
Letter:
Hello. My name is Eric Swanson. I am an 8th grader at Indian Hill Middle School. A speaker from MAP recently visited my school. Her name was Vicky. I was very dissatisfied with the information that she taught us. I will not pretend that everything in this letter is my own idea. One of my friends is helping my directly on this letter. I am also drawing from a number of works written by my other friends and some medical texts. I won’t bother with all the mistakes that Vicky made herself, such as pronouncing scalpel as scapula (which is a bone in your shoulder) or telling us that the hymen was the same as the cervical opening. Everybody makes mistakes. Instead I will try to point out the factual errors that she made and the major problems with your entire program.

First, I have to admit that abstinence works as an almost fool-proof way of preventing pregnancies and STDs. However, the first thing that you learn in statistics is that NOTHING is 100%. I could have sex with a thousand people who have every STD known to mankind and not get one. The probability of that is lower than that of getting struck by lightning while simultaneously winning the lottery, but it isn't zero.

It is possible to get a disease that is usually sexually transmitted without having sex. They can be passed by any exchange of body fluid. If somebody carrying, for example, HIV cuts themselves and bleeds on me (and I have a cut), then I could get HIV from them. The only way to keep from catching a disease that is almost 100% would be to live in a bubble. Even that wouldn’t be totally certain.

Another thing to know is that abstinence education does not work as well as abstinence-and-safe-sex education. The studies on this show different things, but almost all of them say that safe-sex education, when combined with abstinence education, is better than either of them alone. Also, 88% of the people who take the Abstinence Vow break it before they are married. If you teach abstinence-and-safe-sex education, you can reach many more people.

Vicky told us that there were only two STDs in the sixties. They were both bacterial. When I asked where the other twenty-three came from, she told me that the first two mutated into the twenty-five that we have today. The probability of two bacterial diseases mutating into twenty five viral and bacterial diseases in forty five years is far lower than the probability of me not catching a single STD after sex with a thousand people with every STD known to man. In fact, it is lower than the probability of me turning into a frog while still writing this letter. It is all but impossible for a bacterium to mutate into a virus anyway. They are completely separate entities, so even if her two bacterial STDs in the 60s accounted for all the bacterial STDs we have today, it still would not explain the existence of AIDS, HSV, or HPV. Also, warts have been around forever. Chlamydia, Gonorrhea and Syphilis were all three around in the 60s, but we didn’t test for Chlamydia. In truth, nearly all of the STDs there are today were present in the 60s. When I tried to explain this to her, she acted like I didn’t know what I was talking about. She challenged me to come up with a better theory (to get me to sit down and shut up) and I did. THEY ALREADY EXISTED! They were just less common and unknown. People were actually worse off then than they are now, because no drugs existed to let people live with the diseases.

The biggest problem with the presentation was that it was based on shock value. She wanted to make us think sex is disgusting. It didn’t work. The desire to have sex is a very strong instinct. It would take either drugs or really good mental training to suppress sexual desires in teenagers. She could have done far better in reaching us (and maybe convincing us to wait until marriage until we had sex) if she had given us unbiased information instead of information with such extreme biases. But she exaggerated everything. I know that you’re thinking, “This is just another teenager who doesn’t believe the truth.” I already admitted that abstinence is the best way to prevent STDs. I knew that before Vicky even talked to me.

Most of the problems come from Vicky misusing the statistic “¼ of sexually active teens have an STD.” The activities that Vicky had us do were excruciatingly exaggerated. She had us suck on Jolly Ranchers and then put them into a bag. Then she told us that eating one was like having sex. However, all of them were covered in saliva. If saliva represents STDs, there should have been another ninety or so (our class is about thirty people) clean Jolly Ranchers to follow the ¼ statistic. Also, who chooses their sex partners at random? Another activity that sticks out in my mind is the one that she did on the last day. Five teens engaged in sex with one person each. And at the end, one of them had four different STDs. But since she only had sex with four people (even assuming that if you have sex with somebody it’s like having sex with all of their partners), she should only have one STD (once again following the ¼ statistic). And when Vicky showed us the two cups of water, one was FRESH water, not the water that Abe (the student who abstained) washed his mouth out with.

Another major problem is that your data is out of date. All of the slides were from 1998 and Vicky constantly pointed out that the data was out of date and revised it for us. The odd thing was that all of her revisions seem to make the situation worse than the data that we have. I have seen many studies that show that pregnancy and STD rates among teens have gone DOWN since 1998.

Also, at the end of the presentation, Vicky said that if you had sex, you would get either an unwanted pregnancy or an STD. That just isn’t true. Even assuming that every time that you had sex with somebody who has an STD that you would get that STD (which isn’t true), the probability of getting an STD is ¼ (since ¼ of sexually active teens has an STD, then there is a ¼ chance that your partner has an STD). It is possible to get pregnant three days a month out of thirty. This makes the probability of getting pregnant 1/10. Adding the probabilities will give you the probability of getting either an STD or getting pregnant. If you add ¼ (10/40) and 1/10 (4/40), you get 14/40 (or 35%). The next section is almost a direct quote from one of my friends. “It's nearly 2/3 that you're fine having unprotected sex. I'm using all of her figures. I'm not saying that this is the actual chance, but this is according to her. Turns out her stats disprove her point. If you have protected sex, the probability of unwanted pregnancy and actually getting the STD should go down greatly. We assumed you'd automatically get an STD if you have sex with somebody with an STD. This is untrue. I'm not sure what the actual probability of getting an STD is, but it's definitely less than 1/8 while picking partners at random, and far, far less if a condom is used. Also, unwanted pregnancies are almost always defeated by the Pill. If you use the Pill and a condom, you should be almost perfectly safe.”

I believe that your program needs to be changed to teach unbiased information. I personally form very fast first impressions. If somebody exaggerates one thing when they’re talking to me, I don’t trust the rest of their argument. You also need to send people who are experts in the field so that they can answer our questions.

Just for curiosity’s sake, I’d like to know your position on masturbation and gay sex as well. Also, can you explicitly recommend that teens who do choose to be sexually active use condoms? And finally, I’d like to thank you. Your goal is very admirable, but your method needs to be tweaked.