Professor David Paton’s report on adolescent sexually transmitted infections has provoked a storm of headlines, leading the Daily Mail to declare in a headline of April 5 that the "Campaign to cut teen pregnancies sends sex disease rates rocketing".

A more detailed look at what is happening would reveal something altogether different.

The Commons health select committee recently did a long and detailed analysis on sexual health, including the issues affecting young people.

We listened to those who believe that sex education and the provision of contraception is immoral, leads to promiscuity and disease and should be condemned.

But all the evidence points to the opposite being true - that relationship and sex education (as the committee would like it to be called) can delay the age at which people become sexually active, and that if it doesn’t delay it, it will make the important difference between sex being protected sex rather than unprotected.

We pointed out that people also need confidence and good negotiating skills to put safer sex messages into practice. The idea that young people are not exposed to sexual images and ideas from an early age is ridiculous; so rather than leaving it to the media portrayal of sex, let's give young people the good relationship and sex education and support they need.

The government, local primary care trusts (PCTs) and others are taking action to alert young people to the dangers of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and tackling the UK's high rates of teenage pregnancy. We oldies aren't seeing all the advertising that the government is getting across to young people because we tend not to read the magazines that young people do.

In my constituency Swindon's PCT is at the forefront of the work on these issues. Their Teenage Pregnancy and Sexual Health strategy began in earnest in 2002, and is already getting results.

Four Young Persons' Clinics, known as "Confide Clinics" have been established, offering advice on all healthcare issues, and providing pregnancy tests, emergency contraception and free condoms if required. There are more trained youth workers, school nurses and clinics for young people and now every secondary school in my constituency has a 'drop-in' system so that school nurses can signpost young people for sexual health advice.

This isn't about encouraging sex - it is about encouraging responsible behaviour. Figures for 2002 showed that Swindon had already exceeded its 2004 government targets for reducing teenage pregnancies (a reduction in under-18 years conception rates of 14 per cent compared to the 1998 baseline figure).

Undoubtedly, this has led to an increase in awareness of the dangers of STI’s in the youth population. This in turn will have increased the levels of screening, which has led to an increase in diagnosis of STIs not necessarily a rise in infection rates.

Professor Paton's report extrapolates from an increase in STI diagnoses that there must be higher rates of infection. Both may well be rising but it is damaging to suggest that the recent policies may be contributing to increased levels of STIs among young people, when the evidence would suggest that the situation would be worse - ie. we would have higher rates of STIs and particularly higher rates of undiagnosed STIs - without the actions that have been taken on education and provision of services.

We can’t expect to turn the worrying rise in STIs around overnight; if it was as easy as saying no to a one night stand governments would have been able to tackle this before.

We do need to change attitudes. It is the same media that produces headlines on how appalling promiscuity is amongst young people that spends many of the rest of its pages selling itself thorough sexual and generally demeaning images, mostly of women.

A more responsible attitude to relationships and sex will take time to become the norm in our society but that is what we need to achieve and a heads in the sand, we don’t talk about sex attitude won’t achieve that.

Julia Drown MP is Labour MP for Swindon South and a former member of the health select committee

This article first appeared in the ePolitixPlus health sector bulletin.