Are we really experiencing a new epidemic of sexually-transmitted disease? The answer is, it depends on the time-frame you take.
If you take the long view and look back over the last 70-80 years, the answer is no, or at least not yet. Five times as many cases of gonorrhoea as today were reported in the demob-happy late 40s and the swinging 60s and 70s, only plummeting when Aids came along. Syphilis cases, too, reached a post-war peak; but in this case treatment was so effective that the disease never really made a big comeback and the recent sharp increases, it must be stressed, are of a disease that has become very uncommon.
In the short-term, however, cases of every single

STI have shown a sustained rise over the last seven years. Gonorrhoea and chlamydia have doubled, and syphilis has gone up five-fold. (The fact, incidentally, that the groups worst-affected by these three diseases are, respectively, straight men, straight women, and gay men, shows that one cannot generalise about STIs or imagine that a prevention strategy that works for one will necessarily work for another.)
The increases probably reflect that changes in sexual behaviour made in the 1980s as a result of HIV

awareness are not being sustained. This may be partly due to people making informed decisions about safer sex. However, in the past government strategies have only been put