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are on the increase and the fact that this is world-wide owes
much to rapid and relatively cheap travel facilities. Not only
does this compound freer associations among people and sexes
but it can result in the transport of infection from high incident
areas to home before the incubation period elapses.
Increased tourism, immigration, drug addiction, social conditions such as broken homes, maladjustment, overcrowding, low
intellectual standards have all tended to aggravate the situation.
Homosexuality, possibly aided and abetted by recent liberalising
legislation, is also adding its quota to the rising totals.
Promiscuous, enlightened, free or permissive are all epithets
which could be applied to the 1960s depending upon one's point
of view. Unfortunately, in discarding its inhibitions, youth has
been mainly responsible for the rapid spread during this decade of
venereal disease to the extent that it is double that for 1950 and
is fast approximating to the epidemic proportions of 1946 despite
modern treatment techniques. Although, nationally, new cases of
syphilis at 1,606 are only 1/10th of those of 25 years ago, with
this decline has come a corresponding surge in gonorrhoea to an
all-time record level of 55,988.
Whatever factors have been involved in the undoubted change
in our society's mores over the past two decades, youth's volte
face from the Victorian-based family morality is unmistakable.
Sexual activity is at its most potent in young people—it has never
been otherwise—but there are newer elements in the situation,
in particular sex education (which is proving a double-edged
weapon) and the female contraceptive pill. The "pill", although
not necessarily producing promiscuity, has unquestionably relieved many women of the fear of pregnancy and this has affected their attitude towards sex and has encouraged sexuality.
Popularity for the "pill" which, unfortunately, predisposes female
genitalia to certain infections, has resulted in a reduction in the
use of the condom (an effective barrier to contamination) and
would seem, therefore, to be largely instrumental in the recent
increase in the spread of sexually acquired diseases.
The extension of sexuality among females can be demonstrated
in a number of ways. At the special clinics, the ratio of males to
females, which in the early '50's was about 4: 1, is equalizing
rapidly and the average age is falling; pregnancies in females
under the age of 16 years have trebled during the last decade
and some 2,531 abortions were effected in girls of this age group
during 1971; illegitimate births have risen in 20 years from
4.7% of all live births to the current rate of 8.5%.
Country-wide dissemination of venereal disease continues to