Youth united through health education: Building capacity through a community collaborative intervention to prevent HIV/STD in adolescents residing in a high STD prevalent neighborhood

The early detection and treatment of STDs is an effective strategy for slowing the sexual transmission of HIV. The goal of the YUTHE (Youth United Through Health Education) program, a collaborative effort between the San Francisco Department. of Public Health (SFDPH) and the University of California, San Francisco, is to increase sexually transmitted disease screening and treatment among adolescents in a neighborhood with a high incidence of STDs in San Francisco. Youth health educators residing in the intervention neighborhood recruited sexually active youth between the ages of 12 and 22 years to participate in the YUTHE program's intervention between January 2001 and May 2002. Sixty-three percent had two or more sexual partners, 47% did not use condoms consistently, and 18% had a history of STDs. When the intervention neighborhood was contrasted with a sociodemographically matched comparison neighborhood results indicate that both females and males in the YUTHE intervention neighborhood were significantly less likely to have Chlamydia trachomatis infection than their counterparts in the comparison neighborhood.