Stoneleigh Fellow Nadia Dowshen and her Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia colleagues have published a new piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer about how the COVID-19 pandemic has complicated efforts to address the spread of sexually transmitted infections among adolescents and young adults.
While the eyes of the nation are on the coronavirus pandemic, another threat to public health has been steadily growing in the United States. We’ve been battling rising rates of sexually transmitted infections (STI) for the last several years. In fact, 2020 marks the fifth consecutive year of increasing rates of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis in the U.S., due in part to significant funding cuts to more than 50% of the nation’s public health STI programs. And now the COVID-19 pandemic has placed an even greater burden on our strained public health system and supply chains, shifting focus from one major public health issue to another.
