I dunno about sex education classes at your school, but we were often subjected to some terrible pictures of genitalia inflicted with a variety of diseases.

Those diseases were almost as difficult to look at as they were to spell, but perhaps sex ed classes in the UK should follow suit and take a hardline approach to freak people out about STDs or STIs.

Britain is currently in the midst of a “sexual health crisis”, according to the Guardian, and the stats don’t make for pretty reading:

Last year, almost half a million cases of STIs were recorded in England and Wales, while clinic attendances rose by 13%. The most common diagnosis was chlamydia – easily treated with antibiotics, although it can cause pelvic pain and infertility if left.

But what is ringing alarm bells is a rise in cases of gonorrhoea, up tenfold since 2008, and syphilis, an infection that had virtually been wiped out in Britain but is now running at levels not seen since the second world war. The rise is mainly among men who have sex with men, but not entirely. The Victorian spectre of babies born with syphilis is back, with three newborns infected by their pregnant mothers last year.

“When I started working in an STD clinic in 1988, syphilis had been eradicated in Britain. It took 18 months before I saw a single person with syphilis for the first time. Last week, we saw five or six in a day,” says [Patrick French, a genitourinary medicine (GUM) consultant at central and north west London trust], who also works with the British Association of Sexual Health and HIV. “It’s the same with gonorrhoea; it became rather uncommon with the advent of HIV. And now it has become really common. Something really dramatic has happened.”

Yeah, Britain, what the hell has happened?

A large part of the problem is the severe cuts to the NHS sexual health budget, which has medical professionals overworked and underfunded:

“One colleague saw a woman with a horrible first episode of herpes; she only got to see someone at the sixth attempt to get into a clinic and by then she had real problems,” he recalls. “From a service where people were guaranteed to be seen in 48 hours to one where people aren’t getting seen – that’s happened in three or four years. I’m concerned that some people aren’t getting care at all.”

One university’s sexual health services were so swamped that it was actually forced to shut its doors, and longer waiting times often turns people who would otherwise seek treatment away.

They then infect others, and the cycle worsens.

Oh, say hello to a super strain of gonorrhoea:

In March came the news nobody wanted to hear: the first case of super-resistant gonorrhoea, in a British man who caught it from a woman in south-east Asia, that was impervious to both the drugs normally used against it.

For years, doctors have been seeing cases resistant to at least one antibiotic, but this was the first in which neither frontline treatment worked. “They had to go for a very weird antibiotic I’d never even heard of,” says French. “Fortunately, it seems this person hadn’t transmitted it on, but gonorrhoea is a very clever bacteria.”

They’re evolving. If the robots don’t kill us all, the STDs will.

All that being said, the number one problem remains human behaviour:

You need only to be unlucky once to catch an STI. Bacteria don’t discriminate by class or age – which is why later-life divorce has brought nasty surprises for some middle-aged people unleashed on to a dating scene…

Men attending his clinic are now routinely asked about “chemsex” drugs such as GHB, mephedrone and crystal meth – taken to reduce inhibitions – which are linked to riskier behaviour including partner-swapping, group sex and ditching condoms.

Repeat after me – no boerie no braai, no salad no slaai, no condom no naai.

The Brexit leave campaign ran on a promise of massively increasing funding for the NHS, but that was quickly found to be bollocks, so who knows how Britain will turn this crisis around.

Looks like an itch they just can’t stop scratching.

[source:guardian]