Syphilis Rising

It’s an old fashioned disease but like many other retro things it’s making a comeback with a vengeance.

It’s actually a little worrying. More than a little in fact.

It means more sexually active people aren’t using condoms when they have one night stands etc or being blood tested before having unprotected sex.

If you are with the one partner and you are both not sleeping around then all you’ll both need is blood test to confirm you are disease free. Then you can go for it with each other to your hearts content. You may even find time to make children.

In the one night stand arena there are a few ideas about unprotected sex and when it’s OK. For example some will say because they have regular blood tests, say every three months, they should be OK for one night stands every weekend with various partners because the tests prove they are not spreading any diseases around.

The flaw there is the blood tests don’t actually prevent diseases being spread. You can have your blood test and be all clear and then the first person you have sex with can have a disease which you catch and spread to everyone else until you have your next blood test.

You and your partner need to have a blood test before you engage in unprotected sex and the function of the test is to prove you don’t have any diseases.

Some will say because they just finished a relationship they should be OK to hook up with someone else who just finished a relationship because the people in the relationship were disease free.

Trouble is you don’t know if all the people in the relationship were unfaithful or not and they probably wouldn’t admit it if they were.

Some will say they only had unprotected once so it should be OK.

Um no, that’s wrong. Once is all it takes to catch something.

Some will just say anything they fancy at the time since they don’t like condoms and somehow disliking condoms will protect them.

Some believe it’s someone else’s responsibility and they shouldn’t have to do anything.

None of these approaches are actually legitimate methods of protecting yourself and you’d have to be pretty delusional to think they will.

If you can’t wait for a blood test, use condoms. Too bad if you really don’t like them, I think it’s fair to say that you’d like the diseases even less.