Tag Archives: Chlamydia trachomatis

STD Awareness: The Long Road to a Chlamydia Vaccine

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Earlier this year, television personality John Oliver was the butt of an elaborate prank orchestrated by actor Russell Crowe. It started with an auctioned jock strap, and ended with Crowe funding the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward at the Australia Zoo. If you want the full story, check out the video below (beware explicit language).

Despite Oliver playing it for laughs, koala chlamydia is very real and very serious. At least half of wild koalas are infected with a chlamydia type that’s related to the human version. As in humans, koalas can transmit these bacteria through sexual contact. And, similar to the havoc it wreaks in our species, in koalas chlamydia can cause blindness, urinary tract infections, and female infertility — and can be passed from mother to infant. Along with other factors, chlamydia is said to be responsible for plummeting koala populations in many parts of Australia. Continue reading →

STD Awareness: Is Chlamydia Bad?

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chlamydiaPerhaps your sexual partner has informed you that they have been diagnosed with chlamydia, and you need to get tested, too. Maybe you’ve been notified by the health department that you might have been exposed to chlamydia. And it’s possible that you barely know what chlamydia even is, let alone how much you should be worried about it.

Chlamydia is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) out there, especially among young people. It can be spread by oral, vaginal, and anal sex, particularly when condoms or dental dams were not used correctly or at all. It is often a “silent” infection, meaning that most people with chlamydia don’t experience symptoms — you can’t assume you don’t have it because you feel fine, and you can’t assume your partner doesn’t have it because they look fine. If you’re sexually active, the best way to protect yourself is to know your partner’s STD status and to practice safer sex.

Chlamydia increases risk for HIV, leads to fertility and pregnancy problems, and might increase cancer risk.

The good news about chlamydia is that it’s easy to cure — but first, you need to know you have it! And that’s why it’s important for sexually active people to receive regular STD screening. Left untreated, chlamydia can increase risk of acquiring HIV, can hurt fertility in both males and females, can be harmful during pregnancy, and might even increase risk for a certain type of cancer. So why let it wreak havoc on your body when you could just get tested and take a quick round of antibiotics?

To find out just how seriously you should take chlamydia, let’s answer a few common questions about it.

Can Chlamydia Increase HIV Risk?

Chlamydia does not cause HIV. Chlamydia is caused by a type of bacteria, while HIV is a virus that causes a fatal disease called AIDS. However, many STDs, including chlamydia, can increase risk for an HIV infection, meaning that someone with an untreated chlamydia infection is more likely to be infected with HIV if exposed to the virus. Continue reading →

STD Awareness: Will STDs Go Away on Their Own?

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teensCan gonorrhea go away without treatment? Does chlamydia eventually clear up? Can trichomoniasis go away on its own? These are the kinds of questions people pose to Google before Google sends them here — at least that’s what I learned by looking at the blog’s stats. They’re tricky questions to tackle, and for so many reasons.

Some viral STDs stay with you for life, such as herpes and HIV. Others, such as hepatitis B and human papillomavirus (HPV), can be prevented with vaccines but cannot be cured. It’s also possible for the immune system to defeat hepatitis B virus and HPV — but in some cases, these viruses are able to settle in for the long haul, causing chronic infections that can endure for life and even lead to cancer.

Left untreated, syphilis can kill, and gonorrhea can cause infertility.

Non-viral STDs, like chlamydia and gonorrhea, can be cured. However, they usually don’t have symptoms, or symptoms can come and go, making it seem like an infection went away when it actually didn’t. You can’t know your STD status without getting tested, and you can’t self-diagnose an STD based on symptoms and then assume the infection went away when symptoms subside. Getting tested can uncover a problem and clear the way for treatment.

Nonetheless, people want to know if an STD can go away by itself — but there aren’t many studies on the “natural history” of curable STDs like gonorrhea, chlamydia, and trichomoniasis. Studying the natural course of a curable infection would require that scientists put their subjects at risk of the dangers of long-term infection, and no ethics board would approve such an experiment. Continue reading →

STD Awareness: Three Sexually Transmitted Bacteria That Will Shock and Amaze You

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It’s hard to appreciate a pubic louse as an intriguing creature in its own right. Not when an infestation with pubic lice is such a vexing experience. The same can be said for the germs that cause any number of human diseases. But, just as you might have marveled at the microorganisms you spied under the microscope in your high school biology class, the bacteria and other microbes that cause sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) can be fascinating, strictly as scientific subjects.

Let’s look at a few of these fascinating bacteria!

Treponema pallidum, the causative agent of syphilis, is seen in this electron micrograph adhering to a surface with the tapered end of its structure. Image obtained from the CDC’s Public Health Image Library.

Image: Public Health Image Library, CDC

Treponema pallidum: the bacteria that cause syphilis

Before the age of antibiotics, syphilis was the most feared STD out there. Untreated, it can cause serious, sometimes fatal, damage to the body, and can also spread to a fetus during pregnancy. But did you know that earlier versions of syphilis might have been even worse?

Written records of syphilis date back to 1495 when it seemed to appear in Europe for the first time. According to a 1519 description, it caused

Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had laid upon a fire.

Interestingly, such descriptions don’t match modern forms of syphilis, which suggests that it might have evolved into a less virulent form, possibly in response to selective pressure against symptoms that render the host sexually unappealing. Basically, that means that someone with boils emitting “filthy stinking Matter” might have trouble find sexual partners; the pustules of yore don’t seem to decorate the epidermis of contemporary sufferers, making them more likely to perpetuate milder forms of syphilis through sexual transmission.

We can’t hop into a time machine and take samples from European syphilitics in 1495, but some biologists believe that it took about 50 years for evolution to work its mojo on the disease, giving rise to the milder Syphilis 2.0 in the mid-1500s. Continue reading →

STD Awareness: Can You Get an STD in Your Eye?

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eyeSexually transmitted diseases (STDs) usually haunt the nether regions, whether germs have set up shop in the urethra, clustered around the cervix, or burrowed inside a cell. There, they might cause symptoms, like a burning sensation when urinating, unusual discharge, or warts or sores in the genital area.

Sometimes, however, STDs can infect other parts of your body, usually places that boast environments that are warm and moist, just like your genitals. For example, the virus that causes genital warts can also infect the throat to cause growths inside the airway. Oral sex can transfer the bacteria that cause gonorrhea from a urethra to a throat. And herpes can spring up around the mouth or in the genital region, and can be transferred between the two locations.

Instead of wearing goggles during sex, get tested for STDs at Planned Parenthood!

But did you know that certain sexually transmitted organisms can find their way into human eyes? If you didn’t, you do now, so read on to learn about some of the types of STDs that can affect your eyes.

Chlamydia and Gonorrhea

The most common bacterial STD in the country is chlamydia, which strikes nearly 3 million American groins annually. In second place is gonorrhea, which infects around 800,000 Americans every year. Bacteria that infect the genital region have an affinity for its warm, moist atmosphere. And while eyes might not be their first choice, the ocular environment can be pretty inviting as well. When chlamydia or gonorrhea infect the eye, the resulting conditions are called chlamydial conjunctivitis and gonococcal conjunctivitis, respectively. Continue reading →

Over 90 Percent of What Planned Parenthood Does, Part 22: Expedited Partner Therapy for Chlamydia

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200373577-001Welcome to the latest installment of “Over 90 Percent of What Planned Parenthood Does,” a series on Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona’s blog that highlights Planned Parenthood’s diverse array of services — the ones Jon Kyl never knew about.

So, you got chlamydia. It happens. In fact, it happens to an estimated 2.86 million Americans every year, and is the most common bacterial sexually transmitted disease (STD) in the country.

After testing positive for chlamydia, you can receive extra antibiotics to hand-deliver to your partner.

Your infection didn’t come out of thin air — you got it from somewhere. Maybe you have a new sex partner who wasn’t tested and treated for any STDs before you got together. Perhaps you’re in a non-monogamous relationship. You also could have had it for a while before you found out about it, during which time a partner might have unknowingly caught it from you. One reason chlamydia can spread so easily — by vaginal, anal, or oral sex — is because it usually doesn’t come with symptoms. Amazingly, most people with chlamydia don’t know they have it unless they take an STD test to screen for it.

But the fact remains: You got chlamydia. Now what? Continue reading →

STD Awareness: Do Sexually Transmitted Diseases Increase HIV Risk?

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virion HIVYou might have heard that having an STD like syphilis, herpes, or gonorrhea can make it easier to catch HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. But have you ever wondered if this was true? Maybe it’s just a simple correlation — for example, someone who doesn’t practice safer sex would be more likely to catch HIV along with any other STD. That doesn’t mean that one causes the other, does it?

Common STDs like herpes and trichomoniasis can increase HIV risk.

But it’s not a mere correlation. If you take one person with an STD and one person without an STD and expose them both to HIV through sexual contact, the person with the STD will be at least two to five times more likely to become infected with HIV. Why is that? First, many STDs can make you more susceptible to an HIV infection. Second, the immune response triggered by many sexually transmitted infections can summon the types of immune cells that HIV targets.

Furthermore, if a person with HIV is co-infected with another STD, he or she is more likely to transmit HIV to a partner. In other words, STDs can make a person with HIV more infectious. HIV is more likely to appear in their genital secretions, making it easier to transmit HIV through sexual activity. Continue reading →