Man, gonorrhea can be a bummer

Earlier today the Center for Disease Control held a press briefing to announce that the United States could soon face a gonorrhea epidemic.  The STI, which can cause damage to reproductive systems in both women and men and lead to infertility, has long been overshadowed by more difficult to treat sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and herpes.  Every year, 64 million people contract gonorrhea, 700,000 of those in the United States.  However, over the past few decades, the bacteria causing gonorrhea have become more drug resistant, and now there is only a single antibiotic that effectively treats the disease.  Problematically, this antibiotic (ceftriaxone) is only effective when injected, meaning those infected must go to a doctor and get a shot rather than the easier oral treatments.

The CDC announced today it is only "a matter of time" before the disease becomes resistant to ceftriaxone as well.  And when gonorrhea remains untreated and enters the bloodstream, it becomes deadly.

It is difficult to say what impact this seriously concerning announcement will have on sexual attitudes in America.  The AIDS epidemic and ignorance about how HIV spread caused a moral panic in the 1980s that in some ways still persists today. (For example, sexually active gay men are still turned away from blood donations—even if they do not have HIV/AIDS.)  Though HPV is so common that half the sexually active population in America will contract a strain of it at least once in their lives, people still have qualms about the cancer-preventing vaccines.  Last year, Sen. Michele Bachmann baselessly made the claim that these vaccines cause mental retardation.  Clearly, sexually transmitted diseases present a unique public health dilemma because privacy and morality issues come into play.  Even if doctors could cure every disease, a large number of of sexually transmitted diseases would likely still go untreated because of ignorance or shame.

As essentially every study we've read this semester shows, the media does have a profound effect on a variety of sexual attitudes.  As Pinkleton et al. (2012) point out, the media can be an important and helpful educator on sexual health and can influence adolescents to make responsible sexual decisions.  Delgado and Austin (2007) found that sexual health messages were effective in a variety of mediums.  However, Hust, Brown, and L'Engle (2008) showed that so far, the media isn't doing as effective of a job as it could in this realms, choosing to mostly ignore sexual health messages despite the impact they could have.  There is no reasonable or ethical way to stop people from having sex, and there will always be people engaging in risky sexual behaviors that will cause these diseases to persist.  Healthy, educated attitudes about sex are more important than any vaccine when it comes to protecting sexual health.  In the coming years, the media should prioritize and normalize sexual health messages so that we don't have to worry about gonorrhea epidemics and other horrors.