Births to teen-agers have fallen to their lowest rate in at least 60 years throughout the nation, a government agency said Tuesday, and rates for the Northern San Joaquin Valley mirror the trend.

Births to girls ages 15 to 19 dropped last year to 49.6 per 1,000, down 3 percent from 1998 and 20 percent from 1991, according to preliminary numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.

In the Northern San Joaquin Valley, county agencies don't keep teen birth statistics in exactly the same way the National Center for Health Statistics does. But local numbers still point to a trend: Teen-agers are having babies at a lower rate then ever before.

"We've really increased our education programs and it shows," said Laura Tarlo, director of teen pregnancy prevention programs for the Stanislaus County Health Services Agency.

In Stanislaus County, births to girls ages 12 to 18 have dropped from 41.27 per 1,000 in 1996 to 34.67 in 1999. In Merced County, the rate has dropped from 84.4 per 1,000 in 1996 to 64.3 in 1998, the latest year available. Age breakdowns were not available for teen births in Merced County.

In Tuolumne County, 63 girls aged 15 to 19 gave birth in 1996, compared with 52 in 1999. And in San Joaquin County, births to girls ages 15 to 17 have dropped from 41.8 per 1,000 in 1996 to 35.7 in 1998. Figures for 1999 were not available.

Like national analysts, local record keepers say community-wide efforts have helped decrease teen birth rates.

Sharon Smith, public health nurse in Tuolumne County, said television ads in combination with educational campaigns in schools have made the difference.

"The message is really getting out there," she said.

That doesn't mean officials should let up on efforts to curb teen birth rates, local officials said. That's especially important in areas like Patterson in Stanislaus County, according to a University of California at Berkeley study, which found the community to have among the highest teen birth rates in the state.

Tarlo, the Stanislaus County program coordinator, said her agency has started several teen pregnancy prevention programs in Patterson, including one that teaches parents how to talk to their children about sexual issues.

She pointed to the county's teen birth rate for last year.

"Although it's a reduction, that's still 34 girls," she said. "That's 34 too many."

Throughout the nation, experts offered more reasons for the decline in births: Teens are more terrified than ever of sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS, and they are putting off starting families to take jobs in the booming economy.

"Teen-agers frankly are more conservative sexually," said Bill Albert, spokesman for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. "They realize that the risks in the 1990s were quite a bit different than the risks their parents took in the '60s and '70s."

The teen birth rate dropped consistently throughout the 1990s, falling 20 percent for the decade. The drop was particularly sharp among girls ages 15 to 17, whose rate fell 6 percent from its level in 1998 to 28.7 births per 1,000, said the statistics center, a division of the federal government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The teen birth rate fell across racial lines, most dramatically among African-American teens, whose rate dropped 38 percent from 1991 to 1999.

Government demographers credited pro-abstinence organizations along with a swath of other groups -- including churches, parents and school sex-education programs.

The nation's highest teen birth rate was in 1957, roughly 96 births per 1,000. Analysts noted that in the 1940s and 1950s, when the statistics were first kept, people married younger.

Reprinted by permission of Modesto Bee.