LOS ANGELES _ The teenagers tucked their hands into their sweatshirt pockets as they shuffled to form a circle. Some gazed at the asphalt, trying to avoid the game they had been drafted to play.
"It's like hot potato/musical chairs, but with a penis," said the girl leading the group.
The kids gathered on a spring morning in South Los Angeles were about to get a hands-on lesson in sex education.
Many health experts say that public health problems are best tackled outside the doctor's office _ that fixing the culture that perpetuates them is more effective than changing a single patient's behavior. For sexual health, that means combating the stigma around sex.
The teenagers, the girl explained, would pass a plastic, life-size penis around the circle. Whoever was holding it when the music stopped would have to unroll a condom onto it, completing each of the eight steps they had been taught a few minutes earlier.
The music started, and the teens looked up.
The recent all-day event, called Spring Into Love, was intended to get high schoolers more comfortable talking about sex. The hope is that an open dialogue will make them more likely to seek out condoms and STD testing, and eventually reduce the spread of disease.
The focus on stigma is just one of many ways Los Angeles County health officials are trying to think outside the box as they struggle to curb rising STD rates. It's clear that the traditional ways of preventing disease _ patients seeing a doctor regularly to get screened and treated _ have not been working, said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, L.A. County's interim health officer.
"If that really happened, this problem could be taken care of," he said.
The county recently created a Center for Health Equity to evaluate the way certain public health issues are intertwined with social factors such as income and education, as well as racial discrimination.
High STD rates are at the top of the center's list of priorities. In just the past five years, the number of gonorrhea cases in Los Angeles County doubled, with minorities suffering more than most.
"The numbers are only going up," Gunzenhauser said. "What's going on is unacceptable."
