“Unsafe sexual behaviour” and a lack of testing is being blamed for a failure to cut the number of cases of HIV among gay and bisexual men in the last decade.

In the greatest battle of the bands since the Spice Girls and Oasis, The Wanted and One Direction are said to be finally meeting up to call it a truce.

Whether teenage girls should be offered contraception is not a new debate. Neither is the disgust shown by opposers to young girls having bodily autonomy.

The age-old question of whether or not sports people should perform the night before a performance was reignited yesterday amid a frenzy of reports that Commonwealth Games athletes were overindulging in sex in the privacy of the official village.

American teenagers are not as reckless as some people might think when it comes to sex, and are much more likely than people over 40 to use condoms, a study suggests.

The first national campaign to persuade the over 50s to practice safe sex is to be launched next week, after figures showed an alarming rise in sexually transmitted infections among older people.

Two pieces of rare good news have emerged from the 18th International Aids conference being held in Vienna. First, the number of young people infected with HIV has fallen by a quarter in 12 of the 25 worst affected countries in the world, and is on a downward trend in four others, as the prevention message about safe sex appears to be getting through. Second, women have for the first time the prospect of acquiring a means of protecting themselves with the development of a vaginal gel that cuts the HIV infection rate by over 50 per cent.

Argh. Sex education. Yuck to that. Not the sex bit, I mean. The education bit. The bit where sex meets school teacher, strikes up a conversation and before you know it – bam! – has persuaded her to sacrifice all dignity. Look, there she goes again, showing us how to wrap a banana in a condom. Not that it isn't all Very Important Indeed. Obviously. Of course it is, and we need more of it, or we'll end up a nation of teenage pregnancies and unwanted children. The more condoms on bananas the better. Or something. God, sex ed's awkward, isn't it?

People using social networking sites for casual sex are to blame for a four-fold increase in syphilis, a director of public health said today.

Sexual health is more important to couples than meeting partners' friends and family, a survey revealed today.

More than one in 10 people (11 per cent) do not realise a woman can get pregnant if she has sex standing up, according to a poll out today.

David Cameron has done an extraordinary thing. He apologised last week for the homophobia of his own party, singling out Section 28, the Thatcher government's infamous ban on the "promotion" of homosexuality by local authorities.