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Kids' Description of Table 2: Risk of HIV Associated With Sexual Practices (Modified from Grimes and Grimes [1994], who adapted the data from Schram)

• Your skin: Your skin is designed to grasp, dig, and otherwise come into contact with the outside world. If it encounters a microbe, IgA antibodies in it often prevent the microbe from making you sick, though you may get a temporary rash. Cuts or lesions in your skin can enable microbes to enter and cause infection! Poor circulation of the blood that carries antibodies and oxygen to your cells can also leave you susceptable to infection!

  
  
  

• Punctures: Don't puncture your skin with anything. It protects you from many microbes, but can't protect that well when it's punctured! Although needles you find are not likely to have HIV on them, as HIV lives in moist body fluids, not on dry needles, needles in the ground can have tetanus or even gangrene bacteria on them! In addition, if you play with sharp needles with friends, and stick each other, you and they can catch every microbe the other carries! If you accidentally poke yourself with a needle, make sure to wash the area well, get a tetanus shot right away, and watch for infection!

  
  
  

• Your mouth: You eat with your mouth and eat and breathe with your mouth and nose. Your saliva and mucous in these areas once again are rich in IgA antibodies to protect you. Though you may get colds as a result of microbes that are carried on droplets of moisture in the air, you usually get better quickly, with rest and fluids. And you can eat many things that you should never put in your eyes or inject. Of course, taking good care of your mouth and teeth can help keep it healthy and able to fight disease!

  
  
  

• Your eyes and ears: Your eyes and ears are another matter. These are designed to take in sights and sounds (though flashes of light that are too bright can affect your vision, and sounds that are too loud can affect your hearing!). But you should never insert anything into your eyes or ears. If you get dust in your eyes, the best solution is rinsing your eye with cool water, not rubbing it or poking at the dust!

• Other: You should never put anything, absolutely anything, in your rectum either, as the mucosal lining of it tears very easily and becomes infected easily. Because this lining is an important part of your immune system, once it breaks down, so does your body's immune system. It's difficult to get over infections in the colon and rectal area.

  
  
  

• Dating: What about when you date and have partners? You do not need to have sex with everyone you date. Sometimes, you might want to just get to know people other ways. (Young people's genitals have not fully developed at puberty--but continue to develop--and people's tissue tears more easily when they have sex with someone more mature and thus diseases are spread more easily; it often takes at least another year after puberty for the person to be even mature enough to have children--but don't count on this as some people might mature faster!; even when a person is fertile, his/her soft cartilage is not fully hardened, and will not be so until around age 26, so early pregnancy is just not a great idea for young women--it requires special medical care!) Of course, many people do eventually have sex with someone, but the more frequently they change partners, the better their chances are of getting diseases that may be hard to cure. Some people have just one partner all their lives. Of course, you also have to be sure that your partner does not have any other partners, because if he or she has other partners, and catches things from these partners, he or she might transmit these to you. Another option is abstinence. In some cases, you may not feel comfortable with any partner. You need time to just be with yourself, or to just be friends with people, without risking getting sexually transmitted diseases or pregnant. When you abstain from any sex this way, it is called abstinence. Abstinence is one way to make sure that you will not catch anything from a partner you cannot completely trust. If you do decide to go ahead and have sex with someone, of course, you need to use protection. Birth control by itself is not a form of protection against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV. Even things that do protect you against diseases, such as condoms, are not completely effective either, though they can help prevent both pregnancy and disease. If you feel pressure to have sex, think you may have had sex, or are having sex, it might help to find someone to talk with--a counselor, a parent, trained minister/rabbi/priest who works with and understands youth (and does not molest them; not all adults are great to talk with, of course!--your sex life is private, but you do have a right to discuss your fears and concerns with someone other than your partner!).

  
  
  

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