That's the provocative thesis of Andrew Francis, an economist at Emory University in Atlanta who studies HIV/AIDS and the cost of disease. He knew that the rate of new HIV infections spiked after antiretroviral treatments used widely after 2000 made the disease less of a death sentence.
Francis was browsing through historical trends in gonorrhea rates one day, when he saw that the rate of this non-deadly STD really started cranking up in the early 1950s. "Really?" Francis said to himself. "What was going on in the 1950s?"
Like many of us, Francis thought of the '50s as the era of Pat Boone and repressed sexuality. Being an economist, he started running the numbers to find out what was going on. His graphs show an almost perfect correlation between the end of syphilis as a deadly sexually transmitted disease, and the beginning of an era of risky sexual behavior. Down goes the syphilis death rate. Up goes the rate of gonorrhea infections, births out of wedlock, and births to teens.
Did Penicillin, Rather Than The Pill, Usher In Age Of Love? : Shots - Health News : NPR
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