Infertility Prevention Project (IPP)

Overview

CDC, in collaboration with the Office of Population Affairs (OPA) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), supports a national Infertility Prevention Program (IPP) that funds chlamydia and gonorrhea screening and treatment services for low-income, sexually active women attending family planning, STD, and other women’s healthcare clinics. Key IPP partners include the Indian Health Service’s national STD prevention program, state and local STD prevention and family planning programs, family planning regional training centers and state public health laboratories. This program has shown that routine screening of women can reduce chlamydia prevalence and pelvic inflammatory disease (PID) incidence in women. From its start in 1988 as a demonstration project in HHS Region X, IPP has expanded to include all ten federal HHS regions. Within each region, representatives of state STD programs, state family planning and women's health programs, and the state public health laboratories meet several times a year as Regional Advisory Committees with a common goal of detecting and treating women and men with chlamydia and gonorrhea infections. Within each regional committee, participants work together to formulate a common approach to the prevention of chlamydia and gonorrhea infection and their sequelae. The key components of the regional infertility prevention programs are:

1. Clinical (screening, treatment, partner management)
2. Training and Education (of clinicians and laboratorians)
3. Laboratory (tests, bulk purchasing, performance, turn-around-time, quality assurance)
4. Surveillance (local, state, regional data collection, management, and analysis).

Federal funds support screening for and treatment of chlamydia and gonorrhea among sexually-active, low-income women attending public clinics. Federal funds also support the regional advisory committees and their collaborative work, including the chlamydia prevalence monitoring surveillance system to monitor trends in disease and to evaluate program impact. Through the regional committees, laboratory, behavioral, and clinical research is also conducted to supplement information gathered through the chlamydia prevalence monitoring surveillance system.

Regional Infertility Prevention Projects

The following links go to non-Federal sites.

Region I, Region II, Region III, Region IV, Region V, Region VI, Region VII, Region VIII, Region IX, Region X

Sites no longer available for Regions not linked.

Statistics

• Chlamydia Profiles and Prevalence Monitoring Project Annual Report - All Years