| OCR Text |
Show $18 million requested for control of VD; alarming increase noted Of the total $18 million, the statement recommended that $1.5 million be earmarked for development of new methods of gonorrhea control. At least $2 million would be used for syphilis syph-ilis control. An alarming increase in the gonorrhea incidence rate was cited in the American Social Health Association's call for $18 million in federal aid in fiscal 1969 to fight venereal diseases. The association, in a joint statement made with a group of health organizations, said the 375,606 cases of gonorrhea reported in the United States in fiscal 1967 were second only to the 400,639 cases recorded in 1947. The current federal budget for VD control is $10,594,000. The joint statement, titled "Today's VD Control Problem" was prepared under the sponsorship spon-sorship of the ASHA, the American Am-erican Venereal Disease Assn., and the American Public Health Assn., with the cooperation cooper-ation of the American Medical Association and the Assn. of State and Territorial Health Officers. Youth Rate Rises. "Among teenagers (15-19) in calandar year 1966, gonorrhea reached a rate of 425 per 100,000 considerably consid-erably more than twice the national na-tional rate of 179 for all age groups," the statement said. Congress appropriated $500,-000 $500,-000 to be used in 1968 to set up pilot programs to determine the relative benefits of epidemiological epide-miological approaches to gonorrhea gonor-rhea control. The joint statement points out that the actual number of new cases of gonorrhea may exceed 1.5 million a year, but there is a wide gap between reported and actual cases because be-cause many physicians do not report to their health departments depart-ments all of the VD cases they treat. Survey Planned: the ASHA, with the assistance of the AMA Council on Environm e nt a 1 Health will conduct another national na-tional survey of VD incidence to determine the current level of reporting. A similar survey in 1962 indicated 11 of infectious in-fectious VD cases. |
