Risky behavior among teenagers continues to decline, a report Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
But even with fewer adolescents drinking, smoking or having sex in 2007 than their peers did in 1991, CDC officials say troubling racial and ethnic trends show Hispanics are at greater risk than blacks and whites for certain unsafe behaviors.
Hispanic teenagers take more risks, such as using drugs, drinking alcohol on school grounds or attempting suicide, at higher rates than other groups.
Those measures for 2007 are part of the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey among students at public and private high schools every two years since 1991.
"Today's Hispanics are doing much better, but they're still doing considerably worse than our black and white students today," says Howell Wechsler, director of CDC's Division of Adolescent and School Health.
The 2007 national data were collected from 14,041 students who self-reported their behavior and include only blacks, whites and Hispanics because other populations are too few for a representative sample, the CDC says.
The alarm about Hispanics comes because they are growing in population and because levels of improvement have not kept pace with that of their peers, Wechsler says. "They're going to be an increasingly larger segment of the school population."
Hispanics drank alcohol at school at more than twice the rate of black or white students. They also more often skipped school because they felt unsafe; they were more likely to use cocaine, Ecstasy or heroin; and they were more likely to have been offered or sold an illegal drug on school property.
During a CDC briefing, Glenn Flores, a professor of pediatrics at Children's Medical Center of Dallas, said the data reflect good news overall in the decline of risk among adolescents but bad news for Hispanics. While the other groups have shown a decline in risky sexual behaviors, for instance, Hispanics have not.
In 1991, 53% of Hispanics had had sexual intercourse. In 2007, 52% had, which isn't a statistically significant difference. In 1991 and 2007, 17% of Hispanics had had sex during their lifetime with four or more partners.
"Over time, the secular trend is improving," Flores says. "But if you still look at who has the highest risk among the (survey's) three racial and ethnic groups, it's by far significantly greater risk for Latinos."
Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration Studies@NYU, a center at New York University, is well aware of the influence the data about Hispanics could have for the future.
He says 53% of all immigrants in the USA are Latin American, and the initial health advantages new immigrants tend to have over subsequent generations born here "dissipate over time." More than 70% of all children in Los Angeles public schools are Hispanic.
The CDC survey asked questions about a wide variety of behaviors, including television watching and computer time for non-school work as well as using sunscreen and drinking milk.
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
??? Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.