Not doing it: Fewer high school kids are having sex

About 41 percent of drivers admitted to texting or e-mailing while driving, a trend that has not changed in recent years. And the number of teens who say they’ve carried a weapon to school in the past month has fallen by two-thirds (from 11.8 percent in 1993 to 4.1 percent in 2015). High cigarette prices due to increase in taxes, absence of cigarette advertisements from establishments, stronger campaigns against tobacco use and environmental cigarette bans all contribute to reduce the numbers.

The data comes from an annual survey by the CDC of “Youth Risk Behaviors”, which found that only 41 percent of the 16,000 high school students surveyed in 2015 said they’d had sex before, compared to 47 percent over the past decade.

Some breaking news! According to some fresh data released just today, it seems that teens these days (*shakes cane*) aren’t almost as interested in sex as they once were.

And just under a third of the students asked said they had ever tried a cigarette, the CDC found in its annual survey of risky behavior among US children and teenagers. For the survey, named “The National Youth Risk and Behavior Survey”, the researchers interviewed more than 15,000 high school students.

The rate of cigarette smoking and premarital sex is down, however, as is soda consumption and illegal use of prescription drugs.

American Heart Association CEO Nancy Brown issued the following comments today on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is conducted every two years.

However, nationwide, the percentage of students who had not gone to school because of safety concerns is still high. Thirty percent said they’d had sex within the previous three months, a three to four percent decline from surveys taken throughout the last decade.

Center for Tobacco Control director Patricia Folan said that there are a number of factors that could have caused the decrease in teen smoking. About 63 per cent had ever had a drink, down from 66 per cent in 2013 and 75 per cent in 2007. Yet although hookah “smoking” also provides tobacco carcinogens as well as nicotine, Dr. Frieden doesn’t single them out.

The questionnaire also included questions about health-related behaviors like eating breakfast, drinking milk, getting at least 60 minutes of physical activity multiple times a week, watching more than three hours of television a day, and whether a student was overweight or obese.

The one alarming finding in this new report, however, is the high prevalence of vaping.

Just over 38 percent of teens said they had ever tried marijuana.