In a news roundup Robin Marty of RHRealityCheck.org passes along an interesting tidbit

Remember that whole argument that it’s ok to cover Viagra and not birth control because Viagra doesn’t run up other insurance costs?  Look who’s suddenly skyrocketing up the STI charts — sexual enhancements users.

Read the rest of the roundup here.

The information in the article (Business Week but pretty straightforward reporting) is more interesting, with a number of sensible but counterintuitive tidbits.

First, fairly predictably, people most likely to use Viagra, not to mention people who’s partners are likely to use it, are also likely to have come of age at a time when condom use was not widespread, in part because straight people back then relied on the Pill for contraception, and all known STIs were easily treated with antibiotics.

Less predictably, though, it turns out that STI rates for men who use Viagra tend to go up approximately a year before they start taking it, and actually levels off or drops a bit in the year after!

The risk of getting HIV in the year before taking the pills was 3.32 times higher in drug-takers and 3.19 times greater in the year after, compared with those not taking the pills, they said. Users of the medicines also had higher rates of chlamydia.

Source: Business Week

It’s not an insignificant problem, by the way. According to the article

[P]eople aged 40 to 49 accounted for the largest proportion of newly diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases, 27 percent, in 2007, according to the CDC. Those 50 to 59 accounted for 13 percent, while those over the age of 60 accounted for 4 percent.

I want to reinforce a conclusion from the original report and contained in the article as well: Sex education is just as important for people in their 40s and beyond as it is for those in their teens and 20s. Physicians should be strongly encouraged to in turn encourage patients who request drugs like Viagra to practice sexual safety.

Finally I’d like to stress, strongly, that one shouldn’t fall for gendered assumptions about who’s driving “promiscuity” among older people. I can’t put my finger on a link but I’m pretty sure I’ve posted links in the past that suggest up to half of hetero men who seek medication do so at the prompting of their partners. It’s certainly the case that most of the gendered behaviors evolutionary psychologists swear are “innate” or “evolved” turn out to be highly conditional on age and circumstance.