Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) — Awareness and Prevention

Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) — sometimes also called sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and referred to in older literature as venereal diseases — are infections whose main, though not always exclusive, route of spread is sexual contact with an infected person. They are not caused by a single type of organism: different STDs are caused by bacteria (such as the organisms responsible for gonorrhoea and syphilis), by viruses (such as those causing genital herpes, genital warts, hepatitis-B, and HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS), by fungi (as in candidiasis), and by protozoan parasites (as in trichomoniasis). This variety matters clinically, because it affects both how easily a given infection is treated and how consistently it produces recognisable symptoms.

Many STDs, when they do produce symptoms, cause itching, some form of abnormal discharge, mild pain, or localised swelling in the genital region. A genuinely important, and somewhat unsettling, feature of several common STDs, however, is that they may cause no obvious symptom at all in their early stages, particularly gonorrhoea and syphilis in the early phase of infection, and HIV infection over what can be a long symptom-free period. Because a person can feel entirely well and still be infectious, awareness and periodic medical check-up, rather than reliance on visible symptoms alone, are an important part of prevention.

Left undiagnosed and untreated, STDs are not merely a temporary discomfort. Several can lead to more serious complications: pelvic inflammatory disease and consequent infertility in women, for example, is a recognised complication of untreated gonorrhoea or chlamydial infection; some strains of the virus causing genital warts are additionally linked to a raised risk of cervical cancer; and infections such as HIV and hepatitis-B, for which no complete cure yet exists, require lifelong medical management once acquired. It is worth stressing, on the more hopeful side, that most bacterial, fungal and protozoan STDs (Section 3.1 table) ARE curable when detected reasonably early and treated properly with appropriate medicines — the greater danger lies in infections going unrecognised and untreated, not in STDs being inherently untreatable as a group. …