More city public high-school kids are testing positive for sexually transmitted diseases now than two years ago — when the city started its nearly $1 million education and testing program to combat STDs.
More than 8 percent of girls and 4 percent of boys who volunteered for the Department of Health screening program this past school year tested positive for chlamydia or gonorrhea, the two most common bacterial STDs.
That translated into 667 positive test results among the 11,410 teens at 111 high schools who submitted confidential urine samples, an overall infection rate of nearly 6 percent.
That figure was a slight drop from the 2007-08 school year, when 7.3 percent of the tests came back positive.
But it was an increase from 2006-07 — the first year of the program — when the infection rate among a smaller sample of students was 4.8 percent.
Health officials said they’re targeting the two STDs because they can cause severe chronic pain and infertility and increase a person’s chance of getting or spreading HIV if untreated.
In 2008, New Yorkers ages 15 to 19 accounted for roughly one out of every three chlamydia cases in the city, according to the Department of Health. And health officials said the number of those infected is likely higher, given that many who have chlamydia don’t even know it because the disease often has no visible symptoms.
The testing and education program that the city employs to combat STDs costs about $900,000 a year, a tab that includes lab testing, treatment services — including antibiotics — staffing and administrative costs, officials said.
Parents are given the option of pulling their kids from the program, which includes an education component that reached only about 24,000 high-schoolers last year, according to the Health Department.
But some groups say all high-school students should be taught a mandatory sex-education curriculum — not just a small portion of them, and not only in the context of sexually transmitted diseases.
“There is no mandate in New York City or state to teach this,” said Ariel Samach, program associate for the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Rights Project.
Department of Education officials said that while sex education isn’t mandated, it’s something they recommend.
“We provide our recommended curricula for free to all schools,” said a department spokesman.