Half of all victims don't get proper treatment.(rape victims)(Brief Article)

2002 JUL 4 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Half of all women who are sexually assaulted in the United States each year do not receive the recommended medical treatment to prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.

This is the conclusion of a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The results of the study show that 20% of rape survivors receive emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy and 58% are screened for sexually transmitted diseases or given prophylactic medication.

The study appears in the June 2002 edition of the Annals of Emergency Medicine. The researchers suggest there is an increased need for hospital emergency rooms to develop better programs for treating victims of sexual assault.

"Sexual assault survivors suffer tremendous psychological and emotional trauma as well as physical trauma. Our study examines the medical treatment of survivors, and the results indicate that many survivors are not receiving the recommended care," said coauthor David Bishai, MD, PhD, assistant professor of population and family health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"Previous studies have looked at the medical care of rape survivors, but our study is one of the first to examine the scope of the issue on a national level," added coauthor Annette Amey, MS, a researcher with the Abell Foundation and a student at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For the study, Bishai and Amey analyzed the medical care of sexual assault survivors using emergency room data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NHAMCS) for the years 1992 to 1998. Using these data, they created a nationally representative sample of rape survivors and calculated that 91,974 rapes occur in the U.S. each year.