Teen Birth Rate In USA & Public Conserning

Teen Birth Rate Rises in U.S., Reversing a 14-Year Decline

By Rob Stein

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 6, 2007; Page A01

After falling steadily for more than a decade, the birth rate for American teenagers jumped last year, federal health officials reported yesterday, a sharp reversal in what has been one of the nation's most celebrated social and public health successes.

The birth rate rose by 3 percent between 2005 and 2006 among 15-to-19-year-old girls, after plummeting 34 percent between 1991 and 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reported.

This is concerning," said Stephanie J. Ventura, who heads the center's reproductive statistics branch. "It represents an interruption of 14 years of steady decline. Now unexpectedly we have an increase of 3 percent, which is a significant increase."

Ventura said it is too soon to know whether the increase was an aberration or the beginning of a trend. But she said the magnitude of the rise, especially after many years of decline, is worrisome.

"This early warning should put people on alert to look at the programs that are being used to see what works," Ventura said.

While experts said it was unclear what may be causing the reversal, the new data reignited debate about abstinence-only sex-education programs, which receive about $176 million a year in federal funding. Congress is currently debating whether to increase that by $28 million.

"The United States is facing a teen-pregnancy health-care crisis, and the national policy of abstinence-only programs just isn't working," said Cecile Richard, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America . "It is time for everyone who cares about teenagers to start focusing on the common-sense solutions that will help solve this problem."

But proponents of abstinence education defended the programs, blaming the rise on the ineffectiveness of conventional sex-education programs that focus on condom use and other contraceptives, as well as the pervasive depiction of sexuality in the culture.

"This shows that the contraceptive message that kids are getting is failing," said Leslee Unruh of the Abstinence Clearinghouse. "The contraceptive-only message is treating the symptom, not the cause. You need to teach about relationships. If you look at what kids have to digest on a daily basis, you have adults teaching kids about the pleasures of sex but not about the responsibilities that go with it."

Other experts said many factors could be playing a role. It could be, for example, that complacency has set in, or that the increase reflects of a broader trend cutting across all ages. Birth rates have also increased for women in their 20s, 30s and early 40s.

The teen birth rate rose sharply between 1986 and 1991, when it hit an all-time high of 61.8 births per 1,000 girls. The increase led to a massive campaign to counter the trend, and the rates of both teenage sexual activity and teen births began falling steadily every year. Locally, teen birth rates followed that trend, plummeting between the 1990s and 2005.

This summer, however, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the long decline in teenage sexual activity appeared to have stalled nationally, raising fears that it could presage an increase in teen births.

The most recent data come from birth certificates nationwide. While the birth rate among 10-to-14-year-old girls continued to fall, the rate for those ages 15 to 19 increased from 40.5 per 1,000 girls to 41.9 births per 1,000 in 2006.

"It's a pretty astounding increase," John Santelli, who studies teen health issues at Columbia University. "It's really a sea change, since it's been going down and getting better for so long."

Advocates noted that despite the 14-year decline, U.S. teens are still far more likely to get pregnant and have children than those in other developed countries, and teenage mothers and their children are far more likely to live in poverty.

"The vast majority of teenage mothers never finish high school," said Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "Teen pregnancy and child care is directly related to poverty, both for the mother and the child. This should be a wake-up call for a renewed focus on preventing teen pregnancy."

The increase was greatest among black teens, whose birth rate rose 5 percent between 2005 and 2006, reaching 63.7 per 1,000 teens. That was particularly disappointing because black teens had previously made the greatest gains, with the rate among 15-to-17-year-olds dropping by more than half.

"There had been dramatic, dramatic improvement in that community," Brown said. "All of us had hoped it would continue to decline."

The rate rose 2 percent, to 83 births per 1,000, for Hispanic teens, and 3 percent, to 26.6 per 1,000, for white teens.

The report did not include the latest rates for individual states or the District.

Federal officials also reported other disturbing trends, including a continued increase in the rate of babies being born preterm and underweight, as well as another increase in the rate at which babies were born by Caesarean section, which reached an all-time high.

"These are all trends we'd like to reverse," Ventura said.

Garlic and Cancer

Garlic and Cancer: Can Garlic Prevent Cancer?

From Lisa Fayed,
 

Garlic is famed for its supposed health benefits. In fact, it has been used medicinally for over 5000 years for various ailments. From lowering blood pressure to it's anti-bacterial properties, garlic appears to be effective. The question still remains, however, whether garlic can prevent cancer.

Does Garlic Prevent Cancer?

Studies concerning garlic's anti-cancer abilities look promising. Of 37 studies done to examine garlic's effectiveness as a cancer inhibitor, 28 were successful. Preliminary studies show an increased cancer inhibiting effect on prostate cancer and stomach cancer.

Researchers believe that there are many factors in garlic's ability to fight cancer. One factor is the many compounds found in garlic, including ally sulfur. Ally sulfur can slow down damage the progress of cancerous cell growth.

 

Myth & Mad

The Myth of the Mad Mullahs

By David Ignatius

Wednesday, December 5, 2007; Page A29

In the entryway of "Persia House," as the CIA's new Iran operations division is known internally, hangs a haunting life-size poster of Hussein, the martyr revered by Iran's Shiite Muslims. The division was created last year to push more aggressively for information about Iran's nuclear program and other secrets.

Creating Persia House and spinning off Iran from its old home in the agency's Near East division were part of a broader effort to "plus up" collection of secret information, in the words of one senior official. The CIA made it easy for disgruntled Iranians to send information directly to the agency in cases known as "virtual walk-ins." The National Security Agency and other intelligence organizations made similar drives to steal more of Iran's secrets.

Meanwhile, the intelligence analysts responsible for Iran were given new encouragement to think outside the box. To break the lock-step culture that allowed the disastrous mistake on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Thomas Fingar ordered that analysts be given more information about sources and, rather than trying to fit information into preexisting boxes to prove a case, they should simply explain what it meant.

All these strands converged in the bombshell National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that was released Monday. That document was as close to a U-turn as one sees in the intelligence world. The community dropped its 2005 judgment that Iran was "determined to develop nuclear weapons" and instead said, "We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" because of international pressure.

The secret intelligence that produced this reversal came from multiple channels -- human sources as well as intercepted communications -- that arrived in June and July. At that time, a quite different draft of the Iran NIE was nearly finished. But the "volume and character" of the new information was so striking, says a senior official, that "we decided we've got to go back." It was this combination of data from different sources that gave the analysts "high confidence" the covert weapons program had been stopped in 2003. This led them to reject an alternative scenario (one of six) pitched by a "red team" of counterintelligence specialists that the new information was a deliberate Iranian deception.

A senior official describes the summer's windfall as "a variety of reporting that unlocked stuff we had, which we didn't understand fully before." That earlier information included technical drawings from an Iranian laptop computer purloined in 2004 that showed Iranian scientists had been designing an efficient nuclear bomb that could be delivered by a missile. Though some U.S. analysts had doubted the validity of the laptop evidence, they now believe it was part of the covert "weaponization" program that was shelved in the fall of 2003.

The most important finding of the NIE isn't the details about the scope of nuclear research; there remains some disagreement about that. Rather, it's the insight into the greatest mystery of all about the Islamic republic, which is the degree of rationality and predictability of its decisions.

For the past several years, U.S. intelligence analysts have doubted hawkish U.S. and Israeli rhetoric that Iran is dominated by "mad mullahs" -- clerics whose fanatical religious views might lead to irrational decisions. In the new NIE, the analysts forcefully posit an alternative view of an Iran that is rational, susceptible to diplomatic pressure and, in that sense, can be "deterred."

"Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic and military costs," states the NIE. Asked if this meant the Iranian regime would be "deterrable" if it did obtain a weapon, a senior official responded, "That is the implication." He added: "Diplomacy works. That's the message."

While the intelligence community regards Iran as a rational actor, the workings of the regime remain opaque -- a "black box," in the words of one senior official. "You see the outcome [in the fall 2003 decision to halt the covert program] but not the decision-making process." This official said it was "logical, but we don't have the evidence" that Iran felt less need for nuclear weapons after the United States toppled its mortal enemy, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, in April 2003.

The debate about what the NIE should mean for U.S. policy toward Iran is just beginning. But for the intelligence community, this rebuttal of conventional wisdom will restore some integrity after the Iraq WMD debacle. In challenging the previous certitudes about Iran and the Bomb, the NIE recalls the admonition many decades ago by the godfather of CIA analysts, Sherman Kent: "When the evidence seems to force a single and immediate conclusion, then that is the time to worry about one's bigotry, and to do a little conscientious introspection."