Straight ahead on "Our World" ... stay in school and live longer ... nanotechnology and our food supply ... and Bill Gates warns of a shortage of scientists ...
GATES: Today our university computer science and engineering programs include large numbers of foreign students. But our current immigration policies make it increasingly difficult for these students to remain in the United States.
Those stories, future climate change clues from 10,000 years ago, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
On Tuesday, government scientists released the of teenage girls indicating that one-quarter of them were infected with a sexually-transmitted disease, or STD. At that rate, some 3.2 million young American women between ages 14 and 19 are infected. Erika Celeste has more from the campus of Mississippi State University.
CELESTE: The people on the campus of Mississippi State University awoke to the same news heard around the country: a new study, the first of its kind by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which examined the national prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases and infections among American teenage girls.
The study said twenty-six percent of female adolescents in the U.S. have at least one of four common STDs. That surprised this MSU senior, who wanted to remain anonymous.
GIRL: "Well that really does sound like a lot. The only thing I can think that would prevent that, I would think, would be abstinence until marriage and even then you don't know ?"
CELESTE: On the other hand, the study did not surprise the executive director of University Health Services, Dr. Robert Collins.
COLLINS: "You've got to realize that we have a sexually active young population. And the younger a woman is when she begins her sexual activity, the more likely she is to develop an STD because the cervix is not mature enough to defend itself from a lot of the STDs."
CELESTE: CDC researchers tracked the prevalence of HPV [human papilloma virus] or genital warts, Chlamydia, trichomoniasis, and herpes. The study found that African-American girls have the highest percent of STDs at 48 percent ? almost two and a half times the rate of their Caucasian and Mexican-American counterparts. That sounds fairly accurate to an African-American senior named Reeva.
REEVA: "The fact that is the girls may have it but they don't know they have it, and most of them don't want to know. It's as simple as that. They don't want to feel as though they can get an STI [sexually transmitted infection], which they can, because they are having unprotected sex. The majority of my high school was already pregnant, they were at least 16, with a child and working on another one."
CELESTE: The researchers found that about half of the 14-19 year olds in the study said that they had had sex, and among this group 40 percent were infected with an STD.
Unlike Reeva, who grew up in the South, Nicholas went to high school in the Midwest. But he says he saw the same reluctance on the part of adults to talk about sexual responsibility.
NICHOLAS: "When I was in high school, I mean, nobody really in school was talking about [the need to] protect yourself while you're having sex. Nobody in the church [was]. The church should be talking about abstinence. I think that's a subject society looks over, you look at the glorified images of sex [in the media] and you know that they [teens] are having it, but they're not being trained."
CELESTE: The Bush administration policies promote abstinence, but public health officials note that some young people are going to have sex anyway.
MSU's Dr. Collins says while it may be uncomfortable, the bottom line is parents need to discuss sexual responsibility with their children, and he says it's never too soon to begin that discussion.
COLLINS: "The one person that a child will listen to is their parents. Even though [a parent] may not think [their child] is listening, they will hear them."
CELESTE: The health effects of STDs for women can range from infertility to cervical cancer. CDC officials say screening, vaccination, and other prevention strategies for sexually-active women are among the nation's highest public health priorities.
For Our World, I'm Erika Celeste in Starkville Mississippi.
Why do some people live longer, healthier lives than others? Is it diet? Exercise? Where you live? Your family? Well, all of those, and more. And now, as we hear from health reporter Rose Hoban, indicates it may be linked to how much time you spent in school.