How to survive your police career

What Is ‘Super-Gonorrhoea’?

What Is ‘Super-Gonorrhoea’?

Well it’s no superhero, although I’m sure some Hollywood screen writer could push the point if they sensed a film franchise developing from it …

When you look into the subject you soon realise that Super-gonorrhoea can just as easily be summed up as inadequate antibiotics – in recent years some strains of gonorrhoea have developed resistance to the drug azithromycin and so the sufferer has had to be prescribed different antibiotics to control their infection. The logical concern from this is that gonorrhoea will go on to develop similar resistance to these other antibiotics and, in the absence of new drugs becoming available, we will all have to become extremely wary about who we hop in the sack with if we don’t want to contract a really horrible infection that could well kill us.

In our book (available off the website … go on treat yourself to a copy – I’ve got university fees to pay!) we have a chapter entitled Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sexually Transmitted Infections But Were Too Afraid To Ask where we explain about all popular STIs rampaging around the country at the moment. Below is a taster for the non-superhero variant of …

Gonorrhoea

“Gonorrhoea – the clap – is another bacterial STI which, like syphilis, is easy to have treated when you are first infected but can cause all kinds of problems if you leave it to fester. How it became known as the clap I can’t imagine; perhaps all your recent sexual partners would gather around and applaud you on discovering your condition and their need now for tests to see if you had infected them.

As with some of the other STIs, it’s not unusual for gonorrhoea to display little or no symptoms so you may not even be aware that you have picked up a dose – this is the case for roughly half of all women and 10% of blokes. Classic signs in women are, if they do occur, a burning sensation when weeing, some vaginal discharge which is yellow-green and watery in character, bleeding at times of the month other than their period, heavy periods generally and maybe some blood loss as well as abdominal pain during and after sex. Blokes are probably more likely to know something’s amiss if they cotton on to that classic gonorrhoea sign of feeling like their penis is on fire every time they take a wee. They might also notice a yellow-white-green oozing discharge from the tip of said penis and some tenderness to the testicles.

Gonorrhoea is spread through the usual genitals-bottom-oral love triangle and the infector doesn’t need to be displaying symptoms for it to be passed on – sneaky. Just to add to the larks you can also contract gonorrhoea infections to the eyes, throat and rectum … rectal gonorrhoea – now, that’s one for your mum’s round-robin letter at Christmas.

If not recognised and treated gonorrhoea can go on to cause sepsis and infertility in both sexes; in women, it can damage much of the reproduction system and perhaps also cause pelvic inflammatory disease (more of this gem later) while in blokes it attacks the testicles and associated infrastructure which may in time mean that your sperm isn’t going anywhere. Talking of babies, if a female is infected while pregnant there are potential dangers to the baby through miscarriage, premature labour or the baby being born with the eye condition conjunctivitis possibly leading on to permanent loss of vision.

Being bacterial, gonorrhoea can be treated with antibiotics which is probably a little more civilised than the sixteenth century remedy which involved syringing mercury directly into a chap’s urinary meatus. Antibiotics, however, is only a remedy for the condition presenting itself at that time, as opposed to a life-long vaccination; if you pop back in the sack with the same person again and they still haven’t been treated themselves then you are just as likely to pick up a second dose – which I guess is nature’s way of telling you that you’re an idiot.

Urinary meatus, incidentally, for those of you blokes who wish some clarification, is indeed the very eye of your one-eyed trouser-snake”

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HTSYPC

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