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As many as one in four U.S. teenage girls have had a sexually transmitted disease (STD), many infected soon after their first sexual encounter, a new government report shows.

“The high burden of STDs among teen girls reminds us that we can’t ignore this,” said study author Dr. Sami L. Gottlieb, from the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease and Prevention.

“Sexual health is an important part of the overall health and well-being of teenagers,” Gottlieb added. “For too long, we as a nation have been far too squeamish about sexual health issues for teens, but we owe it to our kids to get over it.”

The report is published online Nov. 23 and in the December print issue of the journal Pediatrics.

For the study, Gottlieb’s team collected data on 838 teen girls aged 14 to 19. Using samples provided by the teens, the researchers looked for Neisseria gonorrhoeae, Chlamydia trachomatis, Trichomonas vaginalis, herpes simplex virus type 2 and human papillomavirus (HPV).

The study authors found that 24.1 percent of the girls had one of these STDs and among girls who were sexually experienced, 37.7 percent had an STD. HPV was the most common infection (18.3 percent), followed by chlamydia (3.9 percent).

Moreover, in the year after having their first sexual experience and with only one sex partner, 19.2 percent of the teens developed an STD, Gottlieb’s group found.

To counter these problems, teens need to have early sex education, Gottlieb noted. “The vast majority of people have sex for the first time during their teenage years, so we need them to be prepared,” she said.

In addition, Gottlieb believes that 11- and 12-year-old girls should get the HPV vaccine. “We have an effective and safe vaccine that can prevent most of the bad consequences of HPV infection — cervical cancer,” she stated.

Teen girls and young women should also have a yearly test for chlamydia, Gottlieb said. “This can prevent some of the adverse consequences of chlamydia, such a pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility,” she stressed.

Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine, said that “the authors make a convincing case that rates of both sexual activity and sexually transmitted infections are high in adolescent females in the U.S.”

These are the facts of epidemiology, not ideology, and should be the basis for public health policy, he said.

“Adolescent girls need early access to comprehensive sex education, and barrier contraceptives,” Katz said. “This will not increase sexual activity, but it will attenuate the resultant harms.”

This study also makes a strong case for routine vaccination against HPV, as it is the most common sexually transmitted infection, Katz said. “Since HPV is often acquired so soon after the initiation of sexual activity, early vaccination is the way to go. I speak on this as the father of two young teenage daughters, both of whom have received the Gardasil vaccine,” he added.

Another report released by the CDC last week provided more statistics.

Teen girls aged 15 to 19 accounted for the largest number (409,531) of the 1.5 million reported chlamydia and gonorrhea cases in the United States in 2008, followed by women aged 20 to 24, according to the annual federal report.

The researchers also found that black females continue to have a higher rate of STDs than any other racial or ethnic group.

Last year, there were about 1.2 million reported cases of chlamydia and nearly 337,000 reported cases of gonorrhea in the United States, according to the report.

Parents beware: It’s not unusual for children to ingest the “button” batteries that power everything from wristwatches to cameras, a new study warns.

Some kids swallow the batteries, while others stick them up their nose, researchers found after monitoring cases at a pediatric hospital over a 10-year period and checking case reports from elsewhere.

But, the study authors pointed out, parents and health-care providers often aren’t aware of the dangers posed by these miniature disc batteries.

Button batteries, which are about the size of a coin or smaller, power a variety of devices, including hearing aids, calculators, small toys and musical greeting cards, according to information in a news release from the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery Foundation.

An estimated 3,000 people of all ages accidentally ingest the batteries each year in the United States. About two-thirds of the cases involve children under age 5, with 1- and 2-year-olds at highest risk, the researchers noted.

In the most severe cases, serious consequences can develop, such as vocal paralysis, the need for throat and gastrointestinal tubes, and perforation of nasal passages, according to the study authors.

The experts say it’s vital for physicians to promptly identify and treat ingestion of button batteries. They also call for better packaging and markings on button batteries.

According to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, ingested batteries can cause a variety of symptoms, including abdominal pain, chest pain and vomiting.

You may think e-mailing, texting, talking on the phone and listening to music all at once is making you more efficient, but new research suggests the opposite is true.

Processing multiple streams of information from different sources of media is a challenge for the human brain, according to a study published in this week’s online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New research shows that students who did the most multi-tasking were less able to focus and concentrate — even when they were trying to do only one task at a time.

“The human mind is not really built for processing multiple streams of information,” said study author Eyal Ophir, a researcher at Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab. “The ability to process a second stream of information is really limited.”

Researchers had 262 college students fill out a questionnaire to determine how often they multi-tasked. Students were then asked to complete a series of tests that measured cognitive control, or the process by which the brain directs attention, decides where to allocate mental resources at a given moment and determines what’s important from the many bits of information being received.

Students who were at the upper end of the media multi-tasking spectrum performed more poorly on all the tests than those who multi-tasked the least, even though the students had similar overall intelligence, including SAT scores.

In the first test, students were asked to determine how the orientation of red rectangles had changed while ignoring blue rectangles. The heavy multi-taskers had a harder time filtering out the useless information.

“The heavy multi-taskers couldn’t help paying attention to the blue rectangles and were actually less successful in remembering the orientation of the red rectangles,” Ophir said.

In another test, students were asked whether they were seeing an even or odd number or a vowel or a consonant when shown a letter and a number simultaneously. A prompt asked students to answer either the letter question or the number question.

Frequent multi-taskers took longer to answer than lighter multi-taskers, indicating they had a more difficult time switching between numbers-based and letters-based tasks.

“This was shocking,” Ophir said. “You’d think multi-taskers would be better at task-switching, but they were slower.”

The reasons for the decreased cognitive control are unclear, Ophir said. Researchers cannot say if the multi-tasking itself damages cognitive control — and if so, how much multi-tasking it takes for damage to occur — or if those who tend to multi-task with media have less cognitive control to begin with.

“Either way, the prescription is to multi-task less,” Ophir said. “The big take-away from me is to try to build periods of focus, to create times you are really focused on one thing.”

Media multi-tasking includes doing one or more activities at once, including e-mailing, surfing the Web, writing on a computer, watching TV, texting, playing video games, listening to music or talking on the phone.

“It seems from our survey that everybody is doing some amount of multi-tasking,” Ophir said. “It’s hard to find people that don’t multi-task. But it’s all about intensity.”

The findings have implications for today’s universities and workplaces, where multi-tasking has become the norm, said Dr. John Lucas, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College.

“There is no free lunch in switching from one task to another,” Lucas said. “People multi-task without an awareness that transitioning from one set of responsibilities to another involves some lag time, and when they do switch, the cognitive skills are not going to be as sharp.”

While computers are well-equipped to switch rapidly from one task to another, the human brain struggles with such demands. “The human brain is not a hard disc that can switch from one part of the drive to the other,” Lucas said. “The average person is going to have difficulty performing two tasks as well as he or she would have performed one task and being focused on it over time.”

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