Newest Annual Sexual Health Report Gives Mixed Messages

Australia’s sexual health is in the spotlight after the 2016 Australian Annual Surveillance Report was recently released. The report paints a mixed picture about the sexual health of Australians.

The report was released ahead of the Australasian Sexual Health Conference in Adelaide. It shows that chlamydia is now the most commonly reported sexually transmitted infection in Australia, and that new HIV cases in the general population are neither rising nor falling. So, while there are certainly some positive things to look at, it is the negative statistics of the report that are garnering attention.

Chlamydia and HIV Numbers

Data collected by researchers for the report indicate that around one in 20 Australians between 15 and 29 years of age had chlamydia in 2015. Of this, almost three quarters (72%) of the new infections remained not just undiagnosed, but untreated.

On the surface, this does seem to indicate that cases are rising steadily, which isn’t good news. However, Associate Professor Rebecca Guy, one of the report’s co-authors from UNSW’s Kirby Institute, said that there could be another reason. She believes that the apparent steady increase in chlamydia cases is actually the result of more testing for the STI.

“These positive changes in testing are encouraging, but more is needed to increase testing,particular among young men,” she said.

Professor Guy also drew attention to the rates of new HIV infections in Australia, noting that they had stabilised over the past four years. Between 2012 and 2015, just over 1000 new cases were reported, which is definitely something positive in the long run.

“In this time period when notifications have stabilised, there’s been an expansion in Australia in the delivery of key HIV services, including initiatives to make testing more accessible and easy,” she said.

STIs and Indigenous Australians

Unfortunately, the plateauing HIV rates have not translated into communities of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people, particularly men. In fact, the HIV rates among men in these groups had actually doubled in the past five years, making them around two times higher than in non-Indigenous men.

Associate Professor James Ward from the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, another contributor to the report, said that the numbers couldn’t really be interpreted any other way, and that there was “a clear divergence” in diagnosis rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups.

“There’s been a doubling of diagnoses in people aged over 35 years in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population and very stable rates in people under the age of 35 and in the non-indigenous population over 35 years over the last 10 years,” he said.

Troublingly, this gap is even more noticeable in people from remote and very remote areas, where access of HIV prevention and treatment services are often limited. These areas also tend to have higher rates of other STIs along with injecting drug users.

“There is some underlying risk factors for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population that make it really susceptible to a rapidly increasing HIV epidemic if it was to take hold,” Ward said.

The president of the Australia Federations of AIDS Organisations, Dr Bridget Haire, said the issue was made worse by a lack of funding into the issues.

But Positively

One highly positive thing to take from the most recent report into Australia’s sexual health is that the rate of genital warts has absolutely plummeted in both non-Indigenous and Indigenous populations (particularly for Indigenous women). Report writers suggested this was likely due to the national human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine program currently running in Australian schools.