Some pretty depressing news hit a couple of months ago, when headlines proclaimed kissing could allow gonorrhea to jump from one person to another.
We already knew gonorrhea could be transmitted during oral sex — a terrible fact, given that most people don’t use condoms or dental dams during oral sex. And we knew that oral gonorrhea is more likely to develop drug resistance, which could be helping to drive the possibly untreatable gonorrhea of the near future.
Mouth-to-mouth kissing could be transmitting gonorrhea right under our noses — literally.
Gonorrhea is most famous as an infection of the cervix or the urethra. But the bacteria that cause gonorrhea can thrive in other warm, moist areas of your body — not just the reproductive tract, but also in the mouth, throat, eyes, and anus. Unprotected oral sex can allow those bacteria to travel in either direction between one person’s genitals and another person’s throat.
But what about mouth-to-mouth kissing, like French kissing? Is that enough to allow these bacteria to hitch a ride from one mouth to another? Previous research, using a mathematical model, estimated that mouth-to-mouth contact might be a significant — and underappreciated — mode of gonorrhea transmission. But that was a mathematical model, a sophisticated equation using what we know about a population’s gonorrhea prevalence and sexual behavior to estimate how frequently the infection is transmitted from one mouth to another. Continue reading