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This Issue 02/12/2010

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It had been almost three years since Maria last had sex when she went in for her first women’s health checkup at Student Heath. Like most 21-year-old women, she was going in for what would be the first of a lifetime of yearly exams. She couldn’t help but find the whole thing somewhat uneventful.

Just over a week later, Maria missed a call from Student Health. Something came up in her tests — she needed to call Student Health as soon as possible. When she did, she discovered something she hadn’t even considered possible. For the past three years, after having sex only one time, Maria had been living with chlamydia.

She made her way back to Student Health that day. Maria, who knew little about the sexually transmitted infection that lived inside her, barely knew what to ask. The physicians at Student Health explained the disease and its implications and took care of all the details.

“You know when you have absolutely horrible days,” said Maria, now a senior, whose name has been changed to conceal her identity. “That was one … I’m a good person. These things shouldn’t happen to me. I will never forget that day.”

Despite going untreated for almost three years, Maria would suffer no long-term side effects thanks to the prescription of antibiotics she picked up later that day. According to the Center for Disease Control, chlamydia, which is sometimes referred to as a “silent” disease because about 75 percent of women and 50 percent of men show no symptoms, can cause serious reproductive and other health issues when it goes untreated for too long.

Maria is among 54 students who were diagnosed with chlamydia at Student Health last year according to Deborah Mathis, the chief administrator at Women's Health. This number is on the rise. In the mid ‘90s “we were having maybe 15 cases of chlamydia” per year, said Mathis. In Philadelphia, this increase is more dramatic. In 2007, Philadelphia County had the third highest number of cases in the country.

Overall, chlamydia is representative of the overall trend both at Penn and in the United States. According to the CDC, many diseases whose prevalence had been decreasing for some time have been on the rise in the past few years. These diseases include chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. And these increases are especially important among the college-age population. According to the Guttmacher Institute, almost half of all new STI cases every year occur among 15-24 year olds.

Mathis says the prevalence of STIs at Penn is low, but rising. It is difficult to access the overall number of students affected because many students are diagnosed and seek treatment outside of the University system, and many STIs go undiagnosed.

To date, over 3,000 members of the Penn community have been tested for STIs at Student Health. But testing rates vary dramatically by gender. The vast majority of those tested are women, thanks to regular yearly exams where screenings are offered. Meanwhile, only about 700 are men. That number is up significantly from previous years — in the 2005-2006 academic year, the number of men screened at Student Health approximately doubled, said Mathis.