teen-SPARC

teen-SPARC STI Prevention and Risk Calculator

The teen-SPARC Excel tool is designed to help public health jurisdictions and other entities explore the potential impact of behavior change on reducing sexually transmitted infections (STIs) among the sexually active high-school-attending adolescent population. It focuses on three STIs: gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhea), chlamydia (Chlamydia trachomatis), and HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). It includes three age groups (13-15 year olds, 16-17 year olds, and 18 year olds) and three “sexual partnering groups” (SPGs): males who have sex with males (MSM), males who have sex with females only (MSF), and females who have sex with males (FSM). For HIV, only MSM are modeled.

The tool integrates data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBS) and can also be useful to jurisdictions who do not have local YRBS data, and who either have alternative data sources or who wish to explore what-if scenarios. Defaults are derived mostly from the 2015 national YRBS. Key outputs include the expected number of new infections and diagnoses in the next year among high-school-attending adolescents (for base scenarios), and the change in these relative to a base scenario (for intervention scenarios).