A sex education group in Australia is doing everything they can to raise HIV/AIDS awareness in their area. They say the number of kids who know how to protect themselves against HIV/AIDS is tragically low. And according to them, young Australians are extremely high risk—there's been a 20 percent increase in diagnosed STIs in the past three years, though chlamydia and gonorrhea diagnoses are climbing at a much more alarming rate than HIV/AIDS.

“It's very disturbing actually what we're seeing in Australia at the moment is we've hit epidemic levels of STIs amongst young people,” says Alischa Ross, the founder of Youth Empowerment Against HIV/AIDS (YEAH). And she blames the country's current sex ed curriculum.

“Some of the myths that they have around sexual health include things like if I've had a pap smear then that means I've had a sexual health test,” says Ross. “Actually it doesn't. People don't even think HIV still happens in Australia anymore. I think there's some pretty simple information that we could be passing on to young people in schools.”

But Anne Mitchell, a sexual health professor at La Trobe University, says while it's awesome the group is raising awareness, they're being just a touch alarmist about it.

“You have STIs that can predispose you to infection with HIV, but you have to be having sex with somebody who's got HIV to pass on and we haven't seen that kind of epidemic take off amongst young people,” Mitchell said. “We do find that young people are very knowledgeable about HIV, we've been testing their knowledge on HIV for the past 15 years and their knowledge of HIV has stayed consistently high, whereas their knowledge of other STIs, particularly those they're more exposed to, isn't as good.”

We can see that. Generally speaking, people are more concerned about diseases that may end their lives early than something they can take a pill to cure. But does it really matter which STI kids are protecting themselves from so long as they're protecting themselves? We figure the best way to combat all STIs, regardless their death toll, is to wear condoms every time you have sex and get tested regularly. Seems the most logical to us.