Putting the S(ocial, not just sexual) in STDs
Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones points us to a study showing that teens who French kiss with multiple partners have a substantially elevated (quadrupled!) risk of developing spinal meningitis. I don't recall seeing that on the front page of the major papers. Or the back pages. If the study had shown that oral sex rather than kissing quadrupled the risk Congress would be holding hearings already.
Why? A horrible, life-and-health-threatening disease (meningitis is a big cause of retardation, paralysis, coma, blindness, etc.....) is spread by kissing one part of the body it's a socially transmitted disease. That's ok. If it were spread by kissing another part of the body it would be *sexually* transmitted. Which would somehow make it worse.
Ok, and here are the funniest parts:
- Way more people french kiss with multiple partners than have sex, so kissing numerically causes more illness
- While some of the people surveyed also went further than "first base" the researchers filtered that out: statistically speaking kissing is the culprit.
Still no major calls to action, still no editorializing, still (very little) sermonizing compared to, say, the controversy over genital warts which can be spread directly from hand to genitals but can also be (and often is) transmitted socially from hand to hand and then, in the privacy of one's bedroom, from one's own hand to one's own genitals.
Back in August I speculated how our health-care priorities would be different if we'd chosen to make eating together taboo instead of having sex together. I hypothesized that herpes or HIV would have been quickly and urgently dealt with before it had a chance to spread (as we responded to mad-cow disease) while research and treatment of e.Coli or trichinosis would have been delayed by moral outrage and denial. But that was speculation, virtually science fiction. The kissing/meningitis example is a real-world counterpart.
Other examples are abundant, of course. Consider oral vs. genital herpes. Consider that syphillis can be transmitted non-sexually. Consider that forms of hepititis can be either "socially" or "sexually" transmitted.
I'd like to propose that we refer to all diseases that can be transmitted from person to person as socially transmitted diseases.
What ever happened to good old-fashioned mononucleosis?
[Good question, LushlyMe. It used to be a "sexually" transmitted disease -- assuming kissing counted as sex, which for all intents and purposes it did back in the relativelyl innocent 1950s through 1970s. Then along came Epstein-Barr and a host of related chronic illnesses and mono sort of disappeared. Maybe teenagers somewhere still go "oooh, wooh" when someone gets mono, but I haven't heard about it recently. Which is sort of a shame since it's bound to still be a disease and it's still pretty debilitating. $%!#$! priorities. (I've been watching the Olympics trials lately and it's sort of like only the top six socially-transmitted diseases qualify for attention or something. It's as if public notice of HIV, herpes and HPV back in the 1980s sort of pushed mono out of contention.) --fl]
Great points you make with this post, and as always I agree, it's the less risky practices like kissing or even oral sex that people do the most and with a false sense of safety. For the record the mouth has more types of bacteria than our genitals.
[Add various viruses that can be transmitted with oral herpes, throw in how extremely difficult (not impossible but very, very, very unlikely) oral-genital HIV transmission is, and the distinctions between "sexual" and "social" transmission is pretty vague. And a little dangerous. Thanks, Anastasia. --fl]
"Consider oral vs. genital herpes. Consider that syphillis can be transmitted non-sexually. Consider that forms of hepititis can be either "socially" or "sexually" transmitted.
I'd like to propose that we refer to all diseases that can be transmitted from person to person as socially transmitted diseases."
I second that. Vote anyone?
[Thanks for the vote, Minx! --fl]
As much as I try to be 'open' in regard to such sex/medical studies, I always see the sample group (it being a small representation of the adult or older than 15-19 yrs, population) and there are other factors that contribute and/or lead to a person contracting meningitis apart from kissing (sharing the same glass, inhaling coughed particles) and contraction rates peak between 15-24 yrs of age.
It brings to mind, 'sexual morality' crusades. Basically, just about everything in modern society is potentially bad or lethal in some way, its like a sick joke.
It reminds me of environmental 'campaigns' by multi billion environmental groups, even when actual research (from the source) for example, showed that ice was in fact thickening in Antarctica and not melting.
Socially lessens the 'stigma' associated with 's' TD's, which funnily enough, replaced 'VD' (venereal disease), now that's an eeky term if ever there was one.
[I agree the sample size in the meningitis study was pretty small, but I've always been more interested in what makes societies pay attention to reports than the reports themselves -- in other words what is it we seem to want to see? (I suspect if the sample had been 114,000 instead of 114 the reception would have been the same.) Also, remember the "stigma" goes both ways -- it appears that if a disease isn't "sexually transmitted" it may draw insufficient attention even if it injures more people. (Another example would be, say, breast cancer vs. prostate cancer. Prostate cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women yet prostate cancer is comparatively overlooked.) Thanks, Anastasia. --fl]
If it had been a larger sample, who knows? Would it be overlooked? Like prostrate cancer? Even here where I am, prostrate cancer is overlooked in terms of advertising campaigns on television and osteoporosis (campaigns etc) are targeted toward women, even though an equal number of men (here) are affected.
Sometimes it can be a distraction (those diseases that feature clusters of activity). HIV, hasn't been eradicated, and yet there are still groups (religious) who'd prefer those within some nations of the African Continent go without condoms and 'abstain'.
[The problem with abstinence is that of course it works if you can do it but it works the way inheriting an oil well works if you want to get rich: a great strategy that doesn't work for most people. You're right about osteoporesis too -- my father takes Fosamax every day. Going the other way people overlooked heart disease in women for decades. We draw these little circles and if you're outside the circle you're sunk. Gender's one circle. "Sexual" transmission's another. Kind of a bummer that those circles wind up unnecessarily killing a lot of people. Thanks, Anastasia. --fl]