A curious inference can be drawn from the most recent statistics which is contrary to widespread belief: the rising incidence of VD in the United States does not seem to be more marked among the younger age groups than the others. An increasing incidence of VD among teenagers in Sweden was shown by a Swedish study in which careful mapping of annual case rates of gonorrhea by age group from 1916 to 1959 resulted in roughly but acceptably parallel curves for all groups, with similar peaks and valleys, except for the age group 15 19, in which a rise unmistakably greater than that in the other age groups appeared after World War II. But United States figures show no such trend. Figures given in a U.S. Public Health Service document dated August, 1970, for the calendar years 1956 and 1966 1969 with case rates per 100,000 by age groups, show no age differences for gonorrhea in the ratios of the lowest year (1956) to the highest (1969); while for primary and secondary syphilis the highest ratios that is, the most marked increases appear in the age group 30 39. In fact, the increase in the 40 49 age group has been greater than those in either the 20 24 or the 15 19 group. Increases appear in all the groups, but these statistics lend no support to the idea that young people can be given special responsibility for today's VD problem.

But although neither the peak incidence nor the highest increases in rates of VD are found among teenagers, there is nevertheless a scandalous amount of VD among them and among children as well. In a report from the Los Angeles City Health Department in 1965, of one thousand case histories of males with gonorrhea aged 15 to 60, all from the poorer part of the city population, the average age of first sexual intercourse was said to be 13, and more than half of the group had contracted gonorrhea for the first time by age 16. Boston claims a 6 year old boy thought to be the youngest male with sexually acquired gonorrhea ever reported in the literature. But as we have seen before, gonorrheal vulvovaginitis in young girls, now regarded as caused mainly by sexual molestation by older male partners, reaches down to even more tender years. In recent reports, gonococcal arthritis a late symptom has been found in little girls aged as young as 2 and in a boy of 7. At the other end of the scale is a report dated 1968 of early infectious syphilis in patients aged over 60.