Midwestern town hopes to battle STDs through information, knowledge

Nebraska's Douglas County has the dubious distinction of being the STD capital of the U.S., as the rate of infections, especially among its young residents, consistently surpasses the average of most major cities, according to WOWT.com. Needless to say, its public health officials are hard at work to try to figure out how to change this situation.

"I think one of the most powerful things we can do is help people understand how these diseases get spread," said Marcia Adler, director of Student Health Services at University of Nebraska at Omaha, quoted by the news source.

With this in mind, local doctors, such as Dr Monirul Islam, are planning to go door-to-door to recruit 300 healthy and infected volunteers to participate in a local epidemiological study.

Meanwhile, Adler says she hopes the message about the importance of screening will also get across.

"One of the things people don't understand is that you don't know what your status is unless you've been tested," she told the news website.

The Centers for Disease Control reports that approximately 19 million new STD cases are reported each year, an half of them are diagnosed in people aged 15 to 24.