Sex education seems to be working: study

CALIFORNIA: Sex education seems to be working, if a study on teens behaviour is to be believed. It greatly boosts the likelihood that youths will delay their sex lives, a path breaking study has revealed.

Boys who received sex education in school were 71 percent less likely  and similarly educated girls were 59 percent less likely  to have physical relationship before age 15.

Males were 2.77 times more likely to rely upon birth control the first time they had sex if they attended sex-education classes.

"Sex education seems to be working," said study lead author Trisha Mueller, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"It seems to be especially effective for populations that are usually at high risk," Mueller was quoted as saying in the study reported by ScienceDaily online.

Claire Brindis, interim director of the Philip R Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California at San Francisco, said sex education remains important because kids still harbor "mythology" about sex.

The researchers found that sex education reduced by 91 percent the risk that African-American females in school would have sex before age 15. In general, however, sex education appeared to have no effect on whether female teens used birth control.

According to Mueller, earlier research based on datas from the 1970s to the early 1990s suggested that sex education was not very effective at delaying sex among teens. The new study looked at a sample of 2,019 teenagers ages 15 to 19 years, who responded to a survey during a 2002 study.

However, the research did not explore the hottest debate in sex education: whether classes should teach about contraception or focus entirely on abstinence.