The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease.

It seems that movies, commercials, music and Internet managed to promote sex as exciting, interesting and wonderful, without mentioning its potential negative consequences. Probably this is why fifty percent of the African-American girls ages 14-19 in the CDC study admitted to having sex. Almost all of them were also infected with Chlamydia, trichomoniasis or human papilloma virus.

According to the Seattle Times, researchers at the University of Washington started a study to find out whether comprehensive sexual education could help teenagers avoid unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases.

The study involved 1,719 straight teens aged 15 to 19, of which sixty-seven percent had taken complex classes of sexual education, 24 percent had only received abstinence-based education, which discourages premarital sex, while 9 percent had received absolutely no sex education.

The results of the study showed that the students who had received comprehensive sex education were 60 percent less likely to report a pregnancy than the students who hadn’t received any kind of sex education, and 50 percent less likely than the abstinence-only group of students.

In the New York Times, a Chicago school teacher, Will Okun, offers information about a discussion on sex he had with his students. Asking them about the reasons why they didn’t practice safe sex, the students gave various answers. Some said that guys didn’t like the condoms because they couldn’t feel much, others said unsafe sex means trusting you partner, while others simply said they discovered they didn’t have a condom when they wanted to have sex, but continued anyway.