A 2001 surgeon general’s report identified sexual health and behavior as a national health concern. As a result, sexual behavior research must be funded and supported to protect and improve public health, the researchers said.

“Silence about sex will equal death, because it won’t allow us to take care of the people who need it,” University of California, Los Angeles researcher Thomas Coates, Ph.D., said.

Coates and others presented research on sexual behaviors and HIV infection, the importance of sex for healthy marriages and the biology of arousal that may someday help explain sexual dysfunction and criminal acts like rape and child sexual abuse.

Government-funded sexual behavior research has been under fire since July 2003, when Rep. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., and others introduced a restrictive amendment in the House of Representatives (see HABIT, July 22, 2003). The amendment, which was narrowly defeated, would have prevented the National Institutes of Health from giving grants to five specific sexual behavior research projects.

Congressional challenges to these studies and others have created “an absolutely chilling climate” for sexual health researchers, said Janet Hyde, Ph.D., of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Coates said the controversy has also made it difficult for researchers to critique each other’s work because of fears that “the enemies will pick it up” and use the disagreements to dispute the research’s overall worth.

The briefing was sponsored by the Coalition to Protect Research, which supports federal investments in health-related human sexual research.