Health Services has seen an upsurge in the number of reported cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea over the past six months, especially since the beginning of Fall term.
Despite campus rumors that blame the Class of 2004 for the rise in cases, Director of the Women's Health Program Janice Sundnas said she could not attribute the recent upswing in reported cases to any one group of students. She called pointing fingers in the case of sexually transmitted diseases "unethical."
Sundnas said students at the College have to understand that Dartmouth is far from STD-free.
"There are a lot of students on campus who really do not think that there are sexually transmitted diseases at Dartmouth," she said, explaining that even though the College is in the Ivy League, it is not immune to STDs.
"They're equal opportunity," she said of the diseases.
Despite her reluctance to release the statistics of reported incidents of STDs, Sundnas said cases were not in the range of hundreds.
"Students go on leave terms, they go home, they go away, they see people, they have unprotected intercourse and they bring it back to campus. There are many places for students to contract sexually transmitted diseases," she said of the possible sources.
Sundnas said the STDs on campus range from Herpes to Human Papillomavirus (HPV) to chlamydia.
"All of the sexually transmitted diseases that you find in the general public are here at Dartmouth," she said.
However, the recent spike in cases has upped the number of chlamydia and gonorrhea -- the first and second most common STDs in the nation, respectively.
Chlamydia, a sexually transmitted bacterial infection, is four times more common than gonorrhea and 30 times more common than syphilis. And for every person with herpes, there are six with chlamydia.
Typically, chlamydia has no symptoms, but when there are signs, they appear five to 10 days after infection. For women, they include bleeding, abdominal pain, painful intercourse, fever, painful urination, cervical inflammation and abnormal discharge. For men, symptoms include pus or milky discharge, pain while urinating and swollen testicles.
However, Sundnas emphasized that the majority of cases are undetectable.
"Unfortunately, many women don't have symptoms," she said, explaining that most cases are discovered in routine screenings or after previous partners have told them that they were infected.
Chlamydia is spread by vaginal and anal intercourse. It can also spread from a mother to her baby during birth.
Young adults -- people in the under-25 bracket, specifically -- have the highest rates of chlamydia. Untreated, chlamydia can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), which causes chronic pelvic pain and harm to the reproductive organs. Sundnas said infertility is a common result of chlamydia.
"If you have chlamydia and it is not treated, and you develop pelvic inflammatory disease, there is nothing we can do about that," Sundnas said.
Both chlamydia and gonorrhea are treatable with antibiotics.
The incidence of gonorrhea is highest in high-density urban areas among people under 24 years old who have multiple sex partners and engage in unprotected sexual intercourse.
Sundnas said most STDs are preventable when people use latex condoms during sex -- both oral sex and intercourse. She said birth control pills do not guard against STDs.
"All these people who got it were having unprotected sex," she said of the students who had come in to Health Services recently with gonorrhea and chlamydia.
Sundnas said the best way to guard against sexually transmitted diseases is abstinence, but she said condoms are very effective as well.
"It's a reasonable amount of protection against no protection at all," she said.
Sundnas said there was a "little bump in the number of '04 students who were coming in," but that it is still too early in the term to know if that trend will continue or if it was merely an aberration.
Sexual Abuse Awareness Program Coordinator Susan Marine also denied the incoming class was to blame for the increased cases. Although she heard rumors from a number of students that there had been a spike in cases of STDs in the '04 class, they were only that -- rumors.
She called the campus' reaction of blaming the first year students for the hike in reported incidents "typical" since she said a normal initial response is accusing, "it must be the new people, because who else could it be?"
