The Brockporter Thought For The Day - Thank penicillin for the sexual revolution

From The Week, 02/22/13:

Americans should stop thanking—or blaming—the birth-control pill for ushering in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. New research suggests it was actually the use of penicillin to treat syphilis that opened a new era of promiscuity, which started a decade earlier than previously thought. In studying data about sexually transmitted diseases, Emory University economist Andrew Francis noticed that gonorrhea infections began soaring in the early 1950s, years before the birth-control pill went on the market, in 1960. He then found that teen pregnancies and extramarital births also rose steeply in that decade. What was prompting the behavior change? Doctors began using penicillin to treat syphilis in the mid-1940s; up to then, fear of the disease loomed almost as large as AIDS did in 1990, because it could be fatal. Penicillin cut infection rates by 95 percent. And as soon as that danger was removed, Francis says, there was a lot of extramarital sex going on in the backseats of lots of finned cars.