54% of High School Youth Have Had Sex, Report Says

More than half the nation’s high school students have had sex, including seven in every 10 by their senior year, according to a survey released Friday by federal health officials.

The survey of health habits among 11,631 high school students in grades 9-12 showed that 54% say they have had sexual intercourse, the federal Centers for Disease Control reported.

“We’re particularly concerned about the increase at each grade level,” said Dr. Lloyd Kolbe, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health.

Among ninth-graders, 40% have had sex, according to the CDC survey. At 10th grade, it is 48%. By the 11th grade, it is 57%, and by 12th grade, 72%.

The survey, conducted in 1990, was the first of its kind for the CDC, so exact data is not available from earlier years. But researchers believe high school students were not nearly as sexually active in earlier generations, Kolbe said.

Increasing numbers of sexually active students mean increasing numbers at risk for health problems, CDC researchers said.

“We’re concerned about basically three major public health epidemics here,” Kolbe said. “The first is the epidemic of pregnancy among teen-agers. . . . We’re concerned about sexually transmitted diseases, including the newer (ones) like herpes, papilloma virus, chlamydia. And we’re very concerned about the extent to which these behaviors put young people at risk for the virus which causes AIDS.”

One in 25 students reported having a sexually transmitted disease.

Overall, boys in high school are more likely than girls to have had sex, 61% to 48%, the survey found. And black students are more likely than Latino students or white students to have had sex--72% to 53% and 52%, respectively.

Most of the students who said they had had sex had been sexually active recently. In grades 9-12, 39% of students reported having sex within the preceding three months, the CDC said.

The federal government has set national health goals for the year 2000 that call for fewer than 40% of 17-year-olds (approximately 11th grade) to have had sex and at least 90% of sexually active teen-agers to use condoms.