The merchant seaman has a special VD problem. Although his lot has improved since the days of sailing vessels, with voyages tending to be shorter and ships better supplied with medical facilities, the basic problem has hardly been touched. Men are without women for abnormally long intervals, often under conditions of stress. Their urge to seek female companionship in port is as normal as sex itself. A report in 1964 by Guthe and Idsoe tells us that while VD is coming to be treated extensively aboard ships as well as in the ports, the minimum requirements established for treatment under the Brussels Agreement are seldom met. The rising trends in VD affect especially small seafaring countries like Norway, Sweden, and Denmark as well as Finland and Poland. The problem is of course associated with that of prostitution in port towns.

But commercial navigation has been increasing at a rapid rate in all parts of the world, and no area is exempt from the problem. The same report alludes to high rates of VD among floating populations in Antwerp, Liverpool, London, and New York, but only as examples; elsewhere there is reference to the growing problem in the developing Asian and African countries.

A brief story in the New York Times of May 5, 1969, notes that medical care aboard American ships compares unfavorably with that provided by major foreign fag merchant marines; British, French, Dutch, and Danish ships are mentioned specifically; their seamen "receive far superior shipboard medical care than American seamen." An unrelated story in the same newspaper of April 13, 1969, tells us that in Britain, as an experiment, wives are being allowed to accompany seamen on voyages. Neither of these stories deals specifically with VD.

Something like this idea has been suggested for another group, but not seriously. It is becoming a major scandal, although the facts usually appear only in small items in the papers, that the gonorrhea rate among United States troops in Vietnam is reaching record breaking levels. I have seen the figure of 70 per cent per year, which for comparison with earlier figures is 70,000 per 100,000, even higher than the incidence in Greenland Eskimos. According to Time (November 21, 1969), Brigadier General David Thomas, top medical officer of the U.S. Army in the war zone there, has gone so far as to suggest Army operated brothels. Shades of Saint Louis (the king, not the city)! But the idea was countered by a Baptist weekly in California, which called it "government sponsored moral collapse," with the even wilder suggestion that only married men be sent to war, with their wives, who would stay near but behind the battle zones. I have heard some of the young people who oppose the Vietnam war suggest that the ,old folks who started it ought to do the fighting themselves; but even so the suggestion did not, within my hearing, include the old men's wives. Yet we know that, given a war young people can believe in, the women are as ready as the men to fight it and the children, too, down to a tender age. Now that civilians cannot escape the line of fire, they pitch in and do their best. (see SPECIFIC SOCIAL FACTORS IN THE VD PROBLEM PART III)