Madam, - I share, though from an entirely different perspective, Holly Fawcett's concern (December 22nd) at the disturbing increase of sexually transmitted disease among young Irish people.
Apparently attributing to our children no higher sense than the instincts of brute creation, she proposes the promotion of condom use "to teenagers under the legal age of consent".
Ms Fawcett's claim that condoms provide "a more than 99 per cent protection method" against STIs is patently untrue, as even the manufacturers do not claim anything even remotely approaching that figure. In fact it was the express conclusion of a 2001 study by the US National Institutes of Health that "the published epidemiologic data were insufficient to draw meaningful conclusions about the effectiveness of the latex male condom to reduce the risk of transmission of genital ulcer diseases (genital herpes, syphilis and chancroid)". Does Ms Fawcett know something that both the manufacturers and experts in the field do not?
One has to wonder, as well, whether she is aware of the British experience with regard to teenage sex and sexually transmitted diseases. Having actively promoted condom use among teenagers, some as young as 11, for many years they now find themselves with a "public health crisis in sexual health", according to Prof Michael Adler, the architect of the UK government's Sexual Healthy Strategy.
Syphilis has risen by 486 per cent since 1996. Chlamydia is up by 108 per cent over the same period and rates of gonorrhoea are 87 per cent higher than they were seven years ago. In short, the British government's vigorous attempts to create what the UK Family Planning Association calls a "condom culture" have been utterly counter-productive. They have only encouraged greater promiscuity and sexual irresponsibility, and that at an increasingly younger age.
Common sense and experience show that young people, influenced by good example and given an adequate and timely education in human relationships, have an innate capacity to grow into mature and responsible adults, achieving a fulfilment that they would never come to know were they to follow the bleak and barren path to which Ms Fawcett's "condom culture" beckons them. - Yours, etc.,
GERARD BRADY,
Belmont Avenue,
Donnybrook,
Dublin 4.