"The condom recession"

Nearly didn't go to the focus group last night as I'd been feeling really tired all day. Haven't been sleeping well at all, still been feeling very down and have been having nights full of vivid nightmares. Three nights in a row of that and it all caught up with me. But about an hour before I was somewhat better so got up and went after all.

I'm glad I did as the discussion was very interesting. I won't go into the details of it as the campaign strategy is still very much a work progress (um, we were very critical of some of it) other than to say it was an enjoyable and sometimes very funny experience; I will never think of "transmission fluid" in the same way again....

Some of what we spoke about was in general however and I thought it was relevant to here. Poor old Mr X for example (sometimes I let him post as a guest) has been telling about his terrible Gonorrhoea catastrophes. Last night in fact that very subject came up, and as condom use is decreasing in Australia then there's an increase now in Gonorrhoea. And Chlamydia. I can't find the actual latest data, but this looks pretty alarming. It's from the Kirby Institute Annual Surveillance Report 'HIV, viral hepatitis and sexually transmissible infections in Australia' PDF:

And there's a report about it from the ABC here.

In the most recent national study of condom use – conducted by Roy Morgan in 2008 – only one in five sexually-active Australians between the ages of 16 and 49 reported having worn a condom in the previous six months. And of that condom-wearing minority, only 40% wrapped up every time they had sex. 

"What many Australians don't realise is that while deaths from AIDS are decreasing, HIV infections in some parts of the population and many other STIs are on the rise," says Professor Basil Donovan, head of the Sexual Health Program at The Kirby Institute, University of NSW. "These are quiet epidemics." 

Read the latest Kirby Institute Annual Surveillance Report 'HIV, viral hepatitis and sexually transmissible infections in Australia', launched late last month, and you'll notice one graph that looks like a steep Himalayan mountain trail: that's chlamydia. 

Notifications have climbed roughly 250% since 2000. So far this year, the Australian Government's National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System has recorded more than 58,000 chlamydia infections. 

Gonorrhea is also on the rise, and even HIV – the virus we thought we had licked back in the nineties – keeps rearing its head. 

In 1999 Australia recorded its lowest ever annual HIV infection rate, with slightly more than 700 diagnoses. A little over a decade later, our annual rate of new infections sits just north of 1000. more

This is all from just last year so it's pretty recent.