It should be no surprise that young people are more sexually active now than people were 60 years ago, but a new survey shows just how much things have changed.
By the age of 24, young women have on average three times as many sexual partners as their grandmothers did at the same age.
The survey, conducted for Lloyds Pharmacy in the UK, asked 3000 British women of different ages to recall their sexual experiences and showed that by 24, today’s generation of young women had slept with an average of 5.65 men.
In contrast, their mothers’ generation, who were at the same age in the early 1980s, had taken 3.72 lovers, and their grandmothers had slept with just 1.67 partners at the same age.
The pharmacy told the UK’s Daily Telegraph that increasing promiscuity among women could be one of the reasons that incidences of cervical cancer have not fallen among under-25s in recent years, despite falls among older age groups.
Most of the 3000 cases of the disease recorded in the UK each year are caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection.
The debate is England is now centred on whether the government should pay to vaccinate girls against the virus.
In Australia, where vaccination is more prevalent, experts are calling for a reduction in invasive and expensive Pap smears for the under-25s, claiming that an increase in HPV vaccination would have a greater effect on cervical cancer rates.
Westmead Hospital director of gynaecological oncology, Dr Gerry Wain, told the ABC last year:
“Screening has no benefit in this age group and there should be a major review of the way we conduct screening in Australia, especially given the impact of the cervical cancer vaccine on HPV prevalence rates.”
He added that Australia’s high HPV vaccination rate would dramatically reduce the incidence and prevalence of the virus in younger groups.
