I checked out Mr. Harris’ source on this and it is, not surprisingly, a 2005 article in the New York Times. That article, in turn cited a study published in 2000 by the Guttmacher Institute. In that study (Panchaud C. et al. “Sexually Transmitted Diseases Among Adolescents in Developed Countries” Family Planning Perspectives 2000;32(1):24-32 & 45) the data for the US was taken from 1996. The data for France and the Netherlands came from 1990, 1993, 1996. US Data in 1996 from our CDC showed the incidence of gonorrhea in kids 15 to 19 to be 581.6 per 100,000. (That incidence declined to 490 in 2001 and 432 in 2005, by the way, the time period during which the abstinence programs Harris complains of were funded).

The reported data for France and the Netherlands was 7.7 per 100,000.France does not collect data in gonorrhea in the same systematic way that way do. Instead, they have sentinel data from private labs, which the authors of the report acknowledge dramatically underreports the incidence of gonorrhea. Taking this suspect data for all age groups, the authors then extrapolated age distributions based upon assumptions that they also acknowledge were weak. The data from the Netherlands was compiled similarly, though the authors feel the quality of the data there is better than in France. The author of the study described problems associated with the European data:

For some countries, data come only from sentinel studies (France), for others they mainly from comprehensive official reporting systems (all sources of data are mentioned in our article). We also acknowledged in our study that French data are probably not of the best quality in the sense that they do not count all cases and actual STI levels are probably higher. The Dutch sentinel study is of a much better quality and its results were checked with those of the general declaration national system.
(Source: Christine Panchaud of UNESCO email to Michael Patrick Leahy January 15, 2007)

Harris leaves the reader with three false impressions:

1. That the data was current, as opposed to ten years old.
2. That the unfavorable ratio was the result of US policies on abstinence. In fact, those policies were not in place until AFTER the study, and during the 10 years since the study, US rates have declined dramatically.
3. That the French data does not understates the true incidence of gonorrhea in France, an concession freely made by the authors of the report he cites.


If Harris were intellectually honest, and not a propagandist, he would have made these facts known.