CONFIDENTIAL FILE

Social Disease Problems Bared

Guess I might as well admit it. I’m an old man.

I’m
so old I can even remember back to the late ’30s when young men were
adequately, intelligently warned about the perils of venereal disease.

Just a few years before that, things had been sadly different.

VD was something to be spoken about only in whispers. And never in polite company.

Its
victims hid from view, and frequently from treatment. If they sought
help at all, they sought it from the second-story quacks who
specialized in "quick cures."

As a result of the "quick cures"
many of them would up crippled, blind or hopelessly insane. The
diagnosis of their infection was syphilis. But the basic disease they
suffered from, along with all of us who were not infected, was
ignorance.

Suddenly, just before World War II, a kind of
hard-headed realism broke out all across the country. At the insistence
of responsible medical people, a campaign was launched to make us
recognize that venereal disease was one of our most serious problems.

We were taught that the only way to solve the problem was to talk about it, and speak against it.

Kids
in school began to lean the dangers of these diseases. Parents began to
learn the common sense of talking sex to their offspring. It was the
war years, and the young GIs in addition to the manual of arms were learning, from another government-sponsored manual, how to avoid contracting VD. 

It was an era of common sense.

But it was short-lived.

Because
a remarkable thing happened around that time. Medical science
discovered that penicillin was the true "quick cure" for venereal
infection.

In the years that followed World War II, we lowered
our guard. We thought the great miracle of penicillin had ended the
2,000-year struggle against the dread social diseases.

By
1951, we had become so complacent that most VD educational programs
were completely eliminated. The generation of parents of which I’m now
a member didn’t think it was necessary to forewarn their kids, as they
had been forewarned.

And so, again, another generation of youngsters has grown up in the same ignorance.

Penicillin, we thought, had wiped out VD, so why talk about it any more?

Real Facts Are Different

The
answer to that will shock you. Today — now — 1959, venereal disease
has a reservoir of victims that runs into the millions around the
nation. A frighteningly large percentage of them are drawn from the
ranks of adolescents.

Right in your own home town, city health
officials have just warned the public that VD is again becoming a
serious health menace. And that since 1950, the number of teenagers in
L.A. who have contracted the disease has nearly doubled.

I
talked to one of those kids yesterday. He’s a high school senior. He
comes from an upper-middle-class family, a good neighborhood. His
grades are better than average. He’s a prominent school athlete and
active in student affairs.

But caught gonorrhea. A half-dozen of his fellow students were infected, too.

And, if you ask them why they weren’t more cautious, they’ll tell you they "didn’t know you could still get VD."

Nothing was told to them at school. Their parents didn’t discuss it at home.

That
happened to one high school to a total of seven kids, and maybe a few
more the health authorities haven’t found out about yet.

It seems pretty clear to me that venereal disease is something we better start talking about in polite company once again.