Plan B and the pill are not comparable

I am pretty surprised at the sensationalism of yesterday’s article, “Plan B’s popularity skyrockets.” It is one thing to publish an article on the growing use of a contraception medication recently released for use in the United States – it is another to compare its use to completely dissimilar birth control methods. The article implies that Plan B and medications such as the birth control pill and NuvaRing are somehow comparable – that they are in competing marketplaces. “The number of new Plan B University Health Center prescriptions skyrocketed last year … making it one of the most popular forms of hormonal contraceptives on the campus, second only to the birth control pill,” the article said.

Plan B requires one prescription per instance of sexual activity while the birth control pill covers all sexual activity for the period of one month. A woman who has sex twice a week requires 104 prescriptions of Plan B a year – compared to only 12 for the birth control pill or NuvaRing. Doesn’t it seem a little false to compare the popularity of these medications using prescriptions rates when they operate on completely different scales? One hundred instances of intercourse is going to require more prescriptions of Plan B than prescriptions of birth control no matter what.

Plan B has more in common with the condom than it does with the birth control pill – both protect the user from pregnancy during a single sexual encounter. And I’m just guessing, but I think that the number of prescriptions for Plan B still lags well behind condom sales.

Sam Snellings

Junior

Government and politics

Leadership has not improved traffic

I have known Shukoor Ahmed, this year’s candidate for Maryland House of Delegates for District 23A, for about eight years. Because of the ongoing dilemmas that our community has been facing due to traffic and over-congestion, I’d like to spread the word that Ahmed will work to overcome this problem by supporting the building of the Intercounty Connector and Purple Line.

Time is not the only problem arising from the lack of an ICC. There is also the concern of the sky-high gas prices we must deal with while commuting via unnecessarily long and twisted routes. And moreover, such long delays are now daily concerns for many of us who have to forgo quality time with our families in order to sit in traffic. With time, the Greater Washington metropolitan area has become more and more integrated. Residents all over, including Prince George’s County, hold jobs far from home and are forced to commute. We need to build the ICC so that the traffic from Baltimore to Rockville can be diverted and our commutes to the Rockville and Frederick areas could be faster. Most of us need to commute to jobs in Virginia and Montgomery County. Our delegates have been doing nothing to ease these chronic traffic challenges. Instead, they’ve been delaying and exhausting an immense amount of taxpayers’ valuable time and dollars on vague, fruitless studies. And some opponents of the ICC cite environmental concerns as reasons why it should not be built. But they fail to see that in the greater scheme of things, this new highway would require people to drive less, thus reducing air pollution and overuse of already diminishing quantities of oil.

Ahmed would strike the right balance between environmental concerns and our growing transportation needs. He supports the Intercounty Connector that will alleviate traffic delays, reduce lost productivity, improve quality of air and reduce pollution.

We have had enough of the same leadership for TOO LONG. We need candidates who actually stand for something, and Shukoor Ahmed is one of those candidates.

Udomah C. Ohiri

Lanham