Pregnancy News
Monday, February 2nd, 2009Teen pregnancy less likely in S.F.
San Francisco teens are getting pregnant at nearly half the rate of their peers statewide, but Hispanics give birth eight times as often as whites, according to a new report.
The City’s adolescents are also less likely to be s*xually active — and more likely to use condoms — than others in California, according to “A Snapshot of Youth Health and Wellness,” issued this month by San Francisco-based Adolescent Health Working Group.
San Francisco teens 15 to 19 gave birth at a rate of 20 per 1,000 between 2003 and 2005, well shy of the 34 per 1,000 average reported across the Bay Area and 37 per 1,000 statewide.
However, Hispanic teens in San Francisco gave birth at a rate of 55 per 1,000 in 2004 compared to 7 per 1,000 for white adolescents and 5 per 1,000 for Asians.
“Overall, we’re terrific,” said Marlo Simmons, adolescent health coordinator for The City’s Department of Children, Youth and Families. “But when you boil it down, you can’t help seeing the disparities.”
In general, the lower birth rates — along with heightened s*xual responsibility among San Francisco teens — can be chalked up to schools’ insistence on teaching kids about s*x early and often, according to Charlene Clemens, who works with teen moms at the Family Service Agency of San Francisco.
Students in the San Francisco Unified School District begin learning about HIV and AIDS prevention in kindergarten, get their first lessons in puberty by fourth-grade and by sixth-grade are learning about s*xuality, according to Meyla Ruwin, director of district health programs. The education continues through senior year.
Every piece of the curriculum is approved at state and local levels. Among San Francisco high school students polled for the recent report, only 28 percent reported that they have had intercourse, compared to 48 percent nationwide.
The high birth rate among Hispanic teens in The City, however, is lower than the national average of 82.6 per 1,000 in 2004, according to Clemens.
To reach out to those girls, the Family Service Agency sponsors a program in which teen moms meet with seventh- and eighth-grade students, including at Balboa High School and Visitacion Valley and Horace Mann middle schools. In those talks, the young moms dispel myths about pregnancy and child rearing, according to program director Wave Geber.
Common Chemicals May Delay Pregnancy
Chemicals known as perfluorinated chemicals, which are pervasive in food packaging, pesticides, clothing, upholstery, carpets and personal care products, may delay pregnancy, a new study suggests.
These chemicals are being phased out in the United States because of their toxic effects, and are expected to be completely gone by 2010. However, they remain in the environment and in the body for decades, and have been linked to developmental problems.
“These widespread chemicals apparently lower the fertility in couples trying to get pregnant,” said lead researcher Dr. Jorn Olsen, chairman of the Department of Epidemiology at UCLA’s School of Public Health.
Danish women in the study who had with high levels of perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) took longer to get pregnant, Olsen said.
“If this finding can be replicated, one would have to look for other chemicals to replace these,” he said.
The report is published in the Jan. 29 online edition of Human Reproduction. And it follows on the heels of a report linking another common plastic chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), to developmental problems in fetuses and infants.
For the study, Olsen’s team collected data on 1,240 women who participated in the Danish National Birth Cohort. The researchers took blood samples from the women and interviewed them on how long it took them to become pregnant.
The researchers found that blood levels of PFOS ranged from 6.4 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) to 106.7 ng/ml. For PFOA, levels ranged from 1 ng/ml to 41.5 ng/ml.
Olsen’s group then divided the women into four groups, depending on how much of the chemicals was in their blood.
Women in the three groups with the highest levels of PFOS took from 70 percent to 134 percent longer to get pregnant than women with the lowest PFOS levels, the team report. It took women with the highest PFOA levels 60 percent to 154 percent longer to get pregnant compared with women with the lowest levels of this chemical.
Why these chemicals would delay pregnancy isn’t known, Olsen said, but they may affect hormones involved in reproduction.
Recent animal studies have found these chemicals may have a variety of toxic effects on the liver, immune system and developmental and reproductive organs, he noted.
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