Clapped out

Recently released figures relating to the alarming rise in STIs (Sexually Transmitted Infections) should perhaps be viewed in their historical context. It can't be coincidental that the last time rates were so high was 1918 for gonorrhoea and 1948 for syphilis, in other words after the First and Second World Wars respectively. 

Existential threats seem to bring people together seeking comfort, however fleetingly. The unfortunate concomitant is that it also encourages risk-taking behaviour, with sometimes disastrous results. The largest cohort (one third) suffering the unintended consequences of post-Covid pandemic brief encounters is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 15-24 year-olds. Worryingly, though, especially for a septuagenarian like me (old enough to know better but active enough not to be deterred) rates amongst pensioners have doubled.

For my generation of teenagers and young adults in the 'swinging sixties', gonorrhoea and syphilis were yesterday's worries, effectively allayed by antibiotics. And, for the homosexual community at least, unwanted pregnancy was never an issue - nor was it for the straight community if they used condoms or the newly-available contraceptive pill. For us the real problems began with the HIV crisis. The fifteen-year window of relatively carefree sex that opened up between 1965 and 1980, without the fear of debilitating, possibly life-threatening, disease or unwanted pregnancy, was slammed shut, seemingly forever, by the emerging AIDS pandemic of the early '80s.

However, scientific advances in the management of HIV, such as combination therapy, PEP and PrEP, whilst still not offering a vaccine or cure, have led to a relaxation of precautionary measures which, post-Covid, seems to have become the norm across the spectrum of age groups and sexualities. Psychologically, this is perfectly understandable but physiologically it represents an alarming threat to health. And the greater worry, should this behaviour continue unabated, must be the risk of growing antimicrobial and antifungal resistance as current antibiotics lose their efficacy. We have already experienced Monkeypox and that could just be the start.

It's almost enough to put one off sex completely but, of course, the human sex drive is as indomitable as it is indefatigable. The poems of John Wilmot, the scatalogical 17th  century second Earl of Rochester, are full of indiscriminate sexual activity ("...I fall in a rage, and missing my whore, I bugger my page") but also of foreboding about contracting 'a clap', politely referred to, even in my youth, as Venereal Disease or VD - the disease of Venus, the Goddess of Love. It seems nothing much changes.

But if we don't get a grip (oo-er, missus!) soon humanity is fucked - and not in a good way.

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