A recent survey of middle school and high school sex education teachers in Illinois has found that many do not give comprehensive instruction on abstinence, birth control, HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, Reuters Health/Yahoo News reports (news.yahoo.com, 2/5).  The findings also suggested that many of the teachers had received inadequate or no sex ed training whatsoever.

In the survey, which canvassed 335 sex ed teachers at Illinois schools, 30 percent of respondents said they’d received no training in sex education.

“Most parents support school-based sex education, and teens regard it as an important source of information,” researcher Dr. Stacy Tessler Lindau said in the article. “Yet we found that several important health topics and skills are omitted, more often than not, from most Illinois public school sex education criteria.”

Topics least discussed included information on how to use condoms or birth control, homosexuality and abortion.