Abstinent' teens contracting STI'S

More than 10% of U.S. teenagers who said they practise abstinence tested positive for sexually transmitted disease in a recent study.
The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, calls for more widespread STD testing for American teenagers — even when they say they don't need it.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, researchers looked at about 14,000 teens between Grades 7 and 12 who agreed to provide a urine sample to be tested for gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis.
Of those, just over 11,000 said they'd had sexual intercourse with at least one partner in the previous year, while the remaining 3,000 said they'd been abstinent in that time.
The results came back with 964 participants testing positive for STDs — the vast majority of whom admitted to being sexually active.
But 118 participants — more than 10% — tested positive despite claiming they were abstinent. What's more, 60 of those reported they'd never had sexual intercourse in their life.
“The value of young adults' self-report to the prediction of a positive test result was only modest,” said the report's authors, noting that doctors should regularly screen teenagers' urine for STDs, no matter what they say about their sexual activity.
Usually, family doctors only begin screening for STDs when a patient says they are sexually active.
The authors acknowledged the study's shortcomings. They said enough time passed between the survey and the urine tests that some teens could have contracted STDs more than a year before getting tested. As well, urine tests can occasionally produce false positives.
Also, the definition of sex in the study is limited to heterosexual vaginal intercourse, which is the cause of most, but not all, instances of the three STDs included in the study.