Dear Ann Landers,
et me begin by saying I am a fourteen- year-old girl, and I don't know anything about the subject I am writing about. I mean venereal disease. I only know what I have read in magazines, and that's not much. Can a person get V.D. from kissing someone who has a sore on his lip? Could I get V.D. from kissing my aunt? How can a person tell if he has V.D. without going to a doctor? Where would a teen-ager go for treatment if he didn't want his parents to know? Please give me some information. I feel very ignorant and I can't talk to any adult about this. The kids in my crowd don't know any more than I do, and they'd appreciate some information too. -Curious And Needing Answers

Dear Curious,
First, it is possible to get V.D. from a person (male or female) who has a sore on the lip, but most people do not get it that way. The sore that spreads V.D. is an active chancre, which means the person with the sore has V.D. It is never a good idea to kiss anyone who has an eruption of any kind. Even if it isn't V.D., you don't need it, whatever it is. Self-diagnosis is risky business. Anyone who suspects he might be infected should see his family doctor at once. He will in all probability treat you and not tell your parents. If you have no family doctor, go to the city or county health department. They will treat you free of charge and not snitch if you ask them not to. (This is the policy in Chicago and in most other cities.) And while we are on the subject I would like to urge all teen-agers to cooperate fully with the health officials when they ask you to name your friends. This is not rat-finking. It is your duty to tell the health officer where you have been and with whom. The only way to eradicate V.D. is to track down the sources of infection, and everyone who can, should help. 201 FOURTEEN WOULD YOU BELIEVE? "Do you make up any of those letters?" is the question I am asked most often. The answer is No, I do not. Every letter that appears in the Landers column, so far as I can determine, is strictly for real. No single mind could invent situations to compare with the true-to-life scenarios that cross my desk every day. To para-phrase Abraham Lincoln's famous line, "God must have loved the oddball-he made so many of them." Any day's mail contains evidence that nothing is so ridicu-lous, so loony, so bizarre, but what somebody, somewhere won't do it. And why should this surprise us? Is there a single person who reads these words who has not had at least one experience that would read like a fabricated letter if it ap-peared in Ann Landers column? Occasionally the writer of an extraordinary letter will be-gin, "You're going to think I made this up, but so help me, every word is true." He then proceeds to unravel his fantastic story and I do believe him. How can I be sure the writer isn't putting me on? I can't be sure-completely sure-but through the years I've developed a sixth sense about phony letters. 202 I've learned to spot the clinkers much in the same way that a bank teller who handles money all day can spot a counter-feit. People in trouble don't write masterpieces. The far-out letter that is too well organized, too polished, too neat, is suspect. The genuine letter contains misspelled words, last- minute thoughts are scribbled in the margins, and sometimes the writer runs out of ink and finishes in pencil. The tone of humility and the sense of urgency would be impossible to fake. Of course, I receive some phonies; everyone who writes for a newspaper does, but less than 3 percent of my mail falls into that category. The most literate phony letters come from New Haven, Connecticut. The Yale boys dearly love to fake me out. On occasion I have published a clinker from Yale and labeled it as such, but alas, these letters only serve to produce a blizzard of clinkers from Harvard boys who want to get into the act. Here's my favorite: