by Susan Burner Bankowski and Brandon Bankowski

About the author: Susan Burner Bankowski is associate director of Campaign for Our Children, a national nonprofit organization that encourages healthy sexual behavior among youth. Brandon Bankowski is a resident physician in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.

The spread of sexually transmitted diseases has reached staggering proportions on a global scale, yet hardly anyone wants to talk about them.

With the pervasive use of sex as a marketing tool and the romanticizing of “worry-free sex” in magazines, on television, and in the movies, it is easy to see why sexual promiscuity has increased greatly over the past 50 years. But the tragedy that generally goes unpublicized is the accompanying rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

These diseases...