Venereal Diseases Up In Britain

Rates of sexually transmitted infections continued to rise in Britain last year despite new programs aimed at reining in a decade of steady increases, health experts said Tuesday.

The number of infections last year -- 708,083 -- was 4 percent higher than the previous year, but Britain's Health Protection Agency said the pace of the increase appears to be slowing.

Sexually transmitted diseases have been on the rise across Europe since the mid-1990s. Health experts partly blame complacency over condom use and casual sex as fear of HIV has eased.

Such infections are not reliably tracked globally, which makes it difficult to estimate how bad the problem is or to draw comparisons between countries. Britain is the only country that produces these statistics in a systematic way, the World Health Organization said.

In the most recent global report on the topic, the WHO estimated that in 1999, 340 million new cases of curable sexually transmitted infections occurred worldwide in people aged between 15 and 49.

Apart from being serious diseases in their own right, sexually transmitted infections make it up to 10 times easier for the AIDS virus to spread through sex.

That link is particularly worrying in developing countries hit hard by the HIV epidemic. The United Nations health agency estimates that proper control of those diseases could reduce the incidence of HIV infection by 40 percent.

Sexual health campaigners also blame Britain's problem on delays in treatment, inadequate sex education and long waiting lists at clinics. Waiting lists are an oft-repeated complaint against the British state-funded national health system.

"It is a scandal that the service we offer patients today is worse than it was 90 years ago," said Dr. James Johnson, chairman of the British Medical Association. "During the First World War, a free, rapid and totally confidential service was set up to treat sexually transmitted infections. Nearly a century later, patients ... can wait up to six weeks for an appointment. What use is that?"

Delays in treatment give the diseases more opportunity to spread.

However, health officials said the increases were also partly attributable to more people coming forward for testing.

Gay men and young people remained the groups most affected.

"These are all preventable infections and it is a cause of considerable concern that we are still seeing increases in new diagnoses of STIs across the UK and unsafe sex is undoubtedly a main contributor to this,'' said Sir William Stewart, chairman of the health agency.

"This is the time of year when many young people go on holiday and these figures are a timely reminder of how important it is for people to take responsibility for their own and their partners' sexual health, and to use a condom with new and casual sexual partners," he said.

The largest increases were seen in syphilis, with cases up by 28 percent, and chlamydia, which can cause infertility and is often called the silent infection because it can have no symptoms.

While cases of genital warts increased by 2 percent, gonorrhea went down by 3 percent, from 25,065 infections to 24,309 infections, and genital herpes also dropped by 2 percent, from 18,432 cases to 17,990 cases.

Around 700,000 people are diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease every year. Infections soared during the 1990s as medical advances in AIDS turned HIV infection from a death sentence into a manageable disease.

"Any reduction in the dramatic increases in the numbers of STI cases of the past five years is to be welcomed," Dr Angela Robinson, president of the British Association of Sexual Health and HIV.

But Johnson of the British Medical Association said the latest figures were nonetheless depressing.

Despite the relatively modest 4 percent increase last year, since 1995, the number of infections has increased by 57 percent. Chlamydia almost tripled, while cases of syphilis increased by more than 1,000 percent.

By Emma Ross