From: anonymous
Subject: Birth Control Stats
Posted-By: xx115 (Moderator ofcn.clinic.ob-gyn)
Organization: Organization For Community Networks
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 04:40:29 GMT
Newsgroups: ofcn.clinic.ob-gyn

Where in this big, wonderful internet universe would I find success/failure rate statistics for a long list of various birth control methods?

Thanks.

Answer:

Well, I consider myself a novice in the Internet, so this questions is going to tax my ingenuity. But I tell you what I did. First I cheated. I went to Medline, a database to which I have access. That database can be accessed a number of ways. Through Compuserve, I believe is called Paperchase. There is another one called Health Database Plus. I have access to it through a program called Grateful Med.You can serch under contraception AND failure. But I was not happy. After all, we internet surfers should be able to use cryptic commands to obtain the data we want. So I used The Internet Yellow Pages. There, there are a number of headings that can be useful. I telnet selway.umt.edu, but I found out it was changed to healthline.umt.edu. I, however, could not log in as such. So I used Gopher to healthline.umt.edu 700. I looked for gophers in the USA, then Montana, then U of Montana Student Health Service (healthline). If you look under SEXUALITY, there are plenty of documents on different methods of contraception, including norplant. I few things I found out for you is that the female condom has a failure rate of 15%, female sterilization 1.4% and the rate of condon breakage and slippage are about the same at 2.7%
Enjoy

Ed Kneler, M.D.
P.S. you can also use Mosaic (the WWW) at http://healthline.umt.edu:700

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Ed Kneler, MD

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