Marshall University’s Panhellenic Council partnered with the American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA) Wednesday to present “Let’s Talk About Sex” to sororities.

The female Greek community came together to participate in safe sex education including: texting anonymous questions to the presenter, playing an STD guessing game and figuring out if certain statistics are facts or myths.

The presentation included the statistic that half of 20 million new sexually transmitted infections diagnosed yearly are among men and women between the ages of 15-24.

Laura Scieszka, vice president of the AMWA, helped get the organization involved on Marshall’s campus.

“AMWA’s mission is to further women’s health,” Scieska said. “So it is important to have women medical students teaching women’s health.”

Presenter Nafezza Hussain emphasized that women are more susceptible to sexually transmitted infections, therefore they should get tested regularly. STIs can result in longterm effects on women such as pelvic inflammatory disease, tubal scarring, and chronic pelvic pain.

Katelyn Viglianco, fourth year medical student, said a safe sex presentation should be an annual event rather than periodically. The presentation included the fact from a 2008 Trojan Sexual Health Report Card, an annual ranking of sexual health resources at American Colleges and Universities, on which Marshall University is ranked 128 out of 139 universities for sexual healthy school in the country.

“Marshall doesn’t have a lot of safe sex education available for the students,” Viglianco said. “We want women to graduate without STDs.”

Hannah Sayre, Panhellenic Council president, acknowledged that it is important to educated girls on safe sex, because as a college student, accidents happen. She highlighted that the girls were allowed to text questions to one of the presenters cell phones to ask anonymous questions. Sayre said that she believes it gave the girls an opportunity to ask questions they would not usually ask.

“I think that as college students and as young women, you do have questions about sex and sexually activity and how to stay safe,” Sayre said. “I think it is really good that they were able to come today and present.”

Allyson Carr can be contacted at [email protected].