SEX is everywhere. Used to sell everything from cars to toothpaste on billboards and television, the subject of breakfast radio banter, the dominant subject in cyberspace, and featured on the front page of most magazines, sex is more conspicuous than ever.

This sexual free-for-all belies the stereotype of the repressed Brit. But amid all the imagery and messages, one aspect is conspicuous by its absence: safe sex.

We have already seen the consequences of this imbalance in the record number of teenage pregnancies in this country. But today we learned the repercussions are far wider.

A shocking report by MPs revealed Britain is on the brink of an "appalling" crisis in sexual health. One in ten sexually active young women is infected with chlamydia, syphilis rates are up by 500 per cent and gonorrhoea rates have doubled.

Most worrying of all, the number of new Aids cases has soared by more than 200 per cent in recent years.

So many people are infected with sexually transmitted diseases that the health clinics are said to be turning away "hundreds" of people each week. It is another headache for the National Health Service.

Here, however, a little spending will go a long way. The adage prevention is better than cure is never more appropriate than when applied to sexual diseases. The Government cannot stop people having sex, but it could do far more to alert them to the importance of taking precautions.

In the 1980s, a series of grim television adverts warned of the deadly consequences of unprotected sex. How effective they were in containing the Aids outbreak is hard to gauge.

But that contrasts sharply with the silence on the same subject today.

We would not wish to see messages as sombre as those Eighties ads, which were so bleak as to have been counterproductive.

But an informative sexual health campaign is clearly needed.

Updated: 12:32 Wednesday, June 11, 2003