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In the last several years, there have been more than 4,800 new cases of chlamydia reported each year in the Boston area. Since most of those cases occurred among young people between the ages of 15 and 24, city officials are trying to figure out how to target that demographic with the sexual health information they need to better protect themselves. The Boston Public Health Commission conducted focus groups among the neighborhoods with the highest rates of infection, and found that young people are putting themselves at risk mainly because they don’t know very much about chlamydia — which often doesn’t present obvious symptoms.

“We find that youth in the focus groups tend to get their information from other youth, who may or may not have the story right,” Anita Berry, the director of infectious disease at the Boston Public Health Commission, told WGBH News.

Teens reported that they were having unprotected sex because they believed several misconceptions about how STDs are spread. “One was believing that they couldn’t get infected if they withdrew early during sexual intercourse,” Berry explained. “Other reasons were if your partner said they were your one and only, clearly they don’t have any infection and you don’t need to use any type of protection. They also felt that they often didn’t need protection because their partner was asymptomatic.”

Only eight of Boston’s 32 public high schools taught the district’s sexual health education curriculum this year. But some school districts voluntarily began including more information about sexual health in their curricula when they saw the results from Berry’s focus groups. And school administrators don’t want to stop there — they hope to expand comprehensive sex ed to more middle and high schools, and they’ll vote on a new district-wide wellness policy this week.

And their efforts may soon be bolstered by new statewide standards. A measure currently being considered in the Massachusetts legislature would require all of the state’s public school districts to include comprehensive, medically accurate sex ed material in their health classes. Massachusetts does not currently have any requirements that public schools must provide sex ed. Although some schools do opt to provide sexual health information, others choose to teach abstinence-only curricula that don’t include information about birth control.

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Gabriel Gomez (Credit: Boston Herald)

Gomez has not clarified whether or not he supports the Blunt Amendment, which would allow employers to deny birth control coverage from their employees for any reason. The GOP candidate has admitted he hasn’t actually read the eight-page Blunt Amendment, and one of his spokespeople recently referred to the birth control policy as “inside baseball.” And this week, Gomez struggled to comment on abortion policy — first saying that he supported requiring women to undergo a 24-hour waiting period before obtaining an abortion, and then telling reporters he would vote against such a restriction if it came up for debate in the Senate.

Voters are taking notice. According to new figures from Public Policy Polling, women’s opinions of Gomez have significantly dropped over the past month. Back in the beginning of May, just after Gomez won the GOP primary, 41 percent of women viewed the candidate favorably while 24 percent viewed him unfavorably. In PPP’s most recent poll conducted at the beginning of June, just 35 percent of women had a favorable opinion of Gomez — and the number of women who viewed him unfavorably jumped to 44 percent. Altogether, that’s a 26 point shift away from the Republican candidate among this demographic.

“Women across the Commonwealth are seeing Gomez for who he really is — a pro-life Republican who can’t be trusted to protect women’s rights,” a spokesperson representing Gomez’s opponent, Rep. Ed Markey (D), said in a statement.

During last year’s presidential elections, Mitt Romney — another Republican from Massachusetts — had similar difficulty speaking on the record about women’s issues. The GOP candidate first said he would oppose the Blunt Amendment if it would prevent some women from accessing contraception, then turned around and said that women should “vote for the other guy” if they wanted greater access to birth control. The conflicting messages may have partly stemmed from the fact that when Romney was first running for office in his socially liberal home state, he was pro-choice. And even after he switched his position on abortion, he continued to use choice language to muddle his position on women’s health issues.

Exit polling following the 2012 elections showed that women’s health issues played a decisive role in Romney’s defeat.

Senate nominee Gabriel Gomez (R-MA) (Credit: The Republican)

Gabriel Gomez has reportedly been asked several times by reporters whether he would vote for the amendment, and each time has avoided answering. At a press conference Thursday, he once again ducked: “I’m not sure how much more clear I can be,” he began. He then offered an answer that avoided the question of voting entirely. “Contraception should be available over the counter,” he said. “They should take the politics out of it. And they should take the pharmaceutical companies out of it.”

This echoes an op-ed by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) calling for over-the-counter contraception access. While this could help to de-politicize contraceptive care, it doesn’t help with the prohibitively high costs of some contraception that, despite Gomez’s claim to the contrary, can be arbitrarily enforced by pharmaceutical companies. It also avoids the issue of how to deal with intrauterine devices, or IUDs, which are the most effective form of birth control but require administration by a gynecologist.

Gomez, though trying to portray himself as a moderate, still holds conservative views on women’s reproductive issues as a whole. He opposes the use of public funds to pay for abortion — something that is already illegal, but which Republicans use as a launching point to advocate against funding Planned Parenthood’s preventative services. He has also advocated for giving religious organizations full exemption from covering contraception. Earlier this month, Gomez told a reporter at the Boston Globe, “Honestly, I haven’t read the Blunt Amendment.”

A half-decade of budget cuts has left Massachusetts’ public health department so understaffed that it cannot keep pace with a massive backlog of safety inspections for public facilities and investigations into Americans’ complaints about medical mismanagement and malpractice. State public health officials are now begging lawmakers for more funding in order to prevent another public health disaster like last year’s deadly meningitis outbreak, which stemmed from unclean conditions at an uninspected Massachusetts pharmaceutical mixing plant.

The Boston Globe reports that the budget cuts are so steep that there is now a five-month waiting period for investigating consumer complaints at Massachusetts nursing homes, clinics, and hospitals — including for sexual abuse and medical malpractice complaints. Other facilities such as summer camps, biotechnology firms, and food plants are simply bypassing routine inspections due to the dearth of state inspectors.

Funds were appropriated for surprise inspections of pharmaceutical facilities like the one at the root of last December’s meningitis outbreak — but only temporarily. That has public health officials and Gov. Deval Patrick’s (D) administration worried that the Commonwealth is unprepared for another outbreak barring more funds, since the surprise inspections found rust and mold at many such facilities. The state legislature has only appropriated a portion of the funds so far:

“The department has done a herculean task at doing the best it absolutely can with the resources that have understandably been short over the past half decade,” Dr. Lauren Smith said in an interview last week, her last as interim public health commissioner.

Over the past four years, the bureau responsible for health care safety has seen its budget reduced by about $4.7 million, a 26 percent cut when adjusted for inflation, according to an analysis by the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

Smith said the department needs to make the case for more funding “before there is any adverse outcome for any particular patient.” [...]

The House included the pharmacy money in its budget, but not money for the additional inspectors the administration sought.

But even if funds for additional pharmaceutical inspectors are restored in the legislature’s budget, they still won’t be enough to address the logjam of medical complaints. That’s a major problem, since the existing backlog “means that inspectors performing routine reviews often are unaware of the pending issues,” and cannot incorporate them into their investigations.

Seeing as Patrick has been governor since 2007, he had to have signed off — and even advocated — every budget that cut funding for the public health department and led to the current resource shortage. That underscores the unfortunate reality that, while conservatives are often scrutinized for undermining health initiatives, Democratic leaders are also tempted to balance their budgets at the expense of important public health programs.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) has paired his support of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion with big cuts to local counties’ funding that critics say could cripple important community medical resources. In Massachusetts, Patrick himself has fought to shutter state mental health hospitals, arguing that there are already “too many hospital beds” in the state and that patients can simply pack up and go to other mental care facilities — even though such hospitals tend to be dispersed across long distances.