Health

FLORIDA, USA – With medical concerns like pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases looming over their heads during abstinence-only sex education classes, teenagers across the U.S. are calling for a more comprehensive sex education policy. They say that sex education that also focuses on contraceptives, condoms and understanding one's body addresses teens questions while soothing emotional concerns that many students believe are all too often left unaddressed.

MAKATI, Philippines – Students from a high school in the Philippines have helped launch a sanitation program meant to help them stay healthy and in school.

A pilot school for new sanitation initiatives, the Makati Science High School received sanitation kits for all of its students and a refilling center. The program was funded by a group of organizations led by CityNet, a network of Asia-Pacific municipalities that manages human settlement. The group also included the Philippines division of Unilever, the soap manufacturer.

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – In 1977, South Korea began researching a public health care plan, Lincoln Sampong, a historian, said. It wasn’t until 1989, after 12 years of planning, that the program was finally inaugurated. Sampong said this is exactly what needs to go into the formation of a health service.

However, the Dominican government has formulated a public health care plan in less time than that, and does not seem to have thought through all the kinks before instating it.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam – Vietnam has one of the highest abortion rates in the world and 30 percent of the estimated 500,000 procedures performed there each year are performed on teenagers, according to the latest statistics from the Vietnamese Committee for Population, Family and Children. The committee also found that 28.8 percent of Vietnamese teenagers don’t know how to protect themselves against sexually transmitted diseases. Half of the HIV infections in Vietnam involve people under 25.

Vietnamese teenagers said their lack of knowledge about sexual behavior and reproductive health stems from a societal reticence that is similar in other developing Asian nations.