You might have read the stories claiming that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention feared the chlamydia outbreak that's currently overtaking Crane High School in Texas had now reached "epidemic proportions." The small high school — part of the Crane Independent School District — only boasts 300 students, but 20 (!) of them have supposedly tested positive for chlamydia. Of course, the most troubling fact of all is that Crane High School maintains a strictly conservative approach to sex education — i.e. abstinence-only.
Superintendent Jim Rumage seemed baffled by the presence of chlamydia in a school where 'sex education' actually involves neither sex or education. Speaking to local reporters, Rumage acknowledged that the school's abstinence-only approach "evidently ain't working" (actual quote), but then almost immediately backpedaled in a separate interview. "If kids are not having any sexual activity," Rumage told the San Antonio Express-News, "then they can't get this disease. That's not a bad program."
However, Rumage appears to have jumped the gun. According to Texas officials, though the number of chlamydia at Crane High School is "on the rise" (with three cases in Crane county reported last month), there is no such "epidemic." It's worth nothing that Texas actually does have higher chlamydia rates than the rest of the country, though the only epidemic here seems to be misinformation.
