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The oy of sex The Infectious Diseases Unit of the Montreal Regional Health Board has some statistics you might want to know about. The unit's most recent newsletter details the number of new cases of all reportable diseases in the Montreal area from 1990 to 1997, and says that although the number of cases of sexually transmitted diseases is declining, STDs still pose a "major public health problem." Gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia are in decline--chlamydia is still the most pervasive of STDs. The number of new AIDS cases fell in 1997 after rising steadily since 1990--but the figures only count the number of AIDS cases, not the number of HIV-positive carriers. Cocktail therapies are partly responsible for the decline. Meanwhile, cases of Hepatitis C are rising fast. Hep-C is transmitted the same way as the HIV virus, but is considered easier to contract. And according to the newsletter, not all doctors and clinics report each case of Hep-C they encounter--which means the Hep-C figures are probably an underestimate. A summary of the numbers is provided in the table below. -Philip Preville
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