What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas but sometimes what happens in Cancun comes back to Iowa. Tonya Villhauer, a health educator at the University of Iowa, is warning students who are heading off on Spring Break junkets to use their heads and lay off the booze binges.
Villhauer says one’s alcohol consumption is a factor they can control when other things may be far beyond their control. She says students who go wild in some foreign land and get drunk could be setting themselves up for all kinds of trouble with their judgment impaired, problems they probably could have avoided had they been sober.
Villhauer says the young woman from Alabama, Natalee Holloway, who vanished on Spring Break in Aruba a year ago is a perfect example of what can happen to a trusting student who’s in unknown territory. She says if you’re in a new city or a new country, you don’t know the areas you should be avoiding. Villhauer says one safety net is your friends — stick with your buddies and don’t go off with someone who may seem friendly, as you don’t know what you might be getting into. Lisa James is nurse manager at U-of-I student health.
James says she expects to see a flurry of students come in the week -after- Spring Break to be tested for all sorts of S-T-I’s or sexually-transmitted infections. James says “There’s definitely a big spike in the number of students who want to be tested and then since we’re testing more, we’re probably finding more. We see that week after Spring Break being pretty busy with people concerned about being tested, which is an indicator to us that there may people doing more risky behavior during Spring Break time.”