Stanford Class on Sex Disease Called a First

An interdisciplinary, undergraduate class on sexually transmitted diseases, apparently the first such course in the nation, will be offered at Stanford University this winter, university officials said Friday.

Among topics to be covered are acquired immune deficiency syndrome, genital herpes, syphilis, hepatitis and pelvic inflammatory disease, according to Sylvia Cerel Bowen, a medical student who came up with the idea.

“Members of my generation, which is the post-pill, post-penicillin generation, do not like to think that sex has consequences,” said Bowen, who will be a teaching assistant for the course. “People don’t like to talk at the dinner table” about venereal diseases, she added.

Ward Cates, director of the sexually transmitted diseases division of the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said the class is the first of its type.

Cates, who will be among the experts in biology, law, public policy, sociology and history who will address the class, said that about 13 million people each year contract sexually transmitted diseases. These illnesses cost the country billions of dollars, he said.

Priscilla Alexander, co-director of COYOTE, a prostitutes’ rights organization based in San Francisco, endorsed the course and will be one of its guest speakers.

“In order to prevent AIDS or any type of sexual disease, you have to talk about it. . . . Teaching people about it so much that they don’t feel panic is what’s necessary. You can’t preach abstinence,” she said.

The class will be called biological aspects of sexually transmitted disease. The 25 spaces in a four-unit class have already been filled, and space in a two-unit lecture series that can accommodate 100 is going fast, university officials said.