• Hyperreality@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    A lot of this is reckless sexual behaviour. It’s incredibly frustrating, because one of the medications used to treat syphilis is now in short demand globally. This medication is also used to treat other (potentially fatal) infections. In other words, through no fault of their own people will (or likely already have) died due to people not practising safe sex.

    It’s easy to blame people on tinder, but sex education and poor healthcare are just as much to blame.

    For example, syphillis is often spread orally. I don’t know many people who would wear a condom to give someone a BJ, even if it’s a random hookup with someone whose sexual history they don’t know.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      The thing is my kids era had way better sex education the I did, and parent child talks about dangers because we came out of the AIDS era, but it seems my kids generation has a lack or comprehension about abstract dangers.

      • Hyperreality@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        This is a sensitive subject, but that’s partly changed thanks to drugs like Truvada and PrEP.

        You can now have sex with someone who has HIV and still not contract it. People are having more unprotected sex, safe in the knowledge that they’re on PrEP and they basically can’t contract HIV anymore. Hell, AFAIK you can even take a large dose of PrEP or Truvada AFTER you’ve had risky sex. This is great news. Not having safe sex isn’t. It’s a problem in the gay community.

        Important caveat: apparently people are also getting tested more often exactly because HIV is now far more treatable or preventable, which means doctors are diagnosing cases of syphilis which would otherwise have gone undetected (syphillis can often be asymptomatic until it starts causing serious damage):

        https://www.cbsnews.com/news/syphilis-rates-gay-bisexual-men/