More on STDs

At the same party AC mentioned, conversation naturally turned from herpes to other STDs - namely gonorrhea. (Don't you wish you could have been there?) Most people are probably familiar with Kramer's portrayal of the disease on Seinfeld:



In addition to the burning he describes, infection may also be accompanied by a urethral discharge (sometimes known as gleet). And no, you can't get it from a tractor (but possibly from a blow-up doll). You can, however, get it in non-genital sites such as the throat or eye. Throat infections may be asymptomatic, but common symptoms include redness and soreness. Gonococcal eye infections result in conjunctivitis, as well as a possible discharge.

While gonorrhea is primarily sexually transmitted - so much so that it's presence in children is almost always taken as a sign of sexual abuse - non-sexual transmission (such as from shared towels, rectal thermometers, or even caregiver hands, but not riding a tractor in your bathing suit) does occur. Still, it kind of makes you wonder about that lab pink eye outbreak.

Pubmed tuesday: inflatable dolls

If you are a biology major, and not an art major, you probably know about gonorrhoea. Gonorrhea is an obligate human pathogen and has no vector, so it can only infect during intercourse. There is however one reported case where transmission wasn't directly by sexual contact. Here is a vintage paper in genitourin. med. 1993:

"The skipper from a trawler, who had been 3 months at sea, sought advice for urethral discharge. His symptoms had lasted for two weeks. A urethral smear showed typical intracellular gram-negative diplococci, and a culture was positive for N gonorrhoeae. There had been no woman onboard the trawler; he denied homosexual contacts; and there was no doubt that the onset of the symptoms was more than two months after leaving the port. With some hesitation, he told the story. A few days before onset of his symptoms, he had roused the engineer in his cabin during the night because of engine trouble. After the engineer had left his cabin, the skipper found an inflatable doll with artificial vagina in his bed, and he was tempted to have "intercourse" with the doll. His complaints started a few days after this episode. The engineer was examined, and was found to have gonorrhoea. He had observed a mild urethral discharge since they left port, but he had not been treated with antibiotics. He admitted to having ejaculated into the "vagina" of the doll just before the skipper called him, without washing the doll afterwards. He also admitted intercourse with a girl in another town some days before going to sea. This girl was traced, but the result of her examination is not known. To the best of our knowledge, no case of gonococcal transmission through an inflatable doll has been reported before."

(HT: "it's a microworld afterall")