I’ve been exploring some communicable disease data for Utah (sourced from Utah’s Open Data Portal which, unfortunately, only has data up through 2009) and created the chart below to illustrate something that completely surprised me: the most prevelant communicable disease in Utah over that ten-year period was Chlamydia, which was nearly nine times more prevalent than Chickenpox!

To give you an idea of the difference, there were 43,832 cases of Chlamydia over that time period compared to 5,208 cases of Chickenpox.

A couple questions:

Why do you suppose Chlamydia is so prevalent in Utah?

What effect does this have on our youth?