NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - About 4% of young adults in the US are infected with Chlamydia trachomatis, according to a report published in the May 12th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The highest and lowest prevalence of chlamydial infection is found in black women and Asian men, respectively.

Dr. William C. Miller, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues used urine testing to determine the prevalence of chlamydial and gonococcal infections in a nationally representative sample of 12,548 subjects between 18 and 26 years.

Overall, 4.19% of subjects had a chlamydial infection, 0.43% had a gonococcal infection, and 0.030% had both, the investigators report.

Consistent with previous reports, women (4.7%) were more likely to be infected with C. trachomatis than men (3.7%), the authors found. Black women had the highest prevalence of infection-13.95%--and Asian men had the lowest rate-1.14%. In terms of geographic regions, the highest rate-5.39%--was in the South, while the lowest was in the Northeast-2.39%.

The prevalence of gonorrhea was varied strongly by ethnicity. For blacks, the rate was 2.13%, whereas, for whites, the rate was just 0.10%.

"The high prevalence of chlamydial infection in both men and women suggests that current screening approaches that focus primarily on clinic-based testing of young women are inadequate," the authors note.

"The reduction of disparities in the prevalence of both chlamydial and gonococcal infections across racial/ethnic groups must also be a priority," they add.

JAMA 2004;291:2229-223.

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