By Our Marriage and Family Correspondent
The “disease no one wants to talk about” is running out of control. But it need not happen. The real underlying cause of venereal disease can be wiped out!!
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ou have the good luck to be having a sex life at a time when medical science is able to knock out the venereal disease in rapid order …If you do get a sore or a discharge or the feeling that something is wrong … run to your gynaecologist and get fixed up” (The Sensuous Woman, by “J”).
This is the claim of a one-time number one best seller. Such erroneous ideas have been read by perhaps ten to twenty million American women. Million other men and women receive the same misleading message from reading certain other popular and various “swinging singles” publications. The idea is swing now, get the shot later; play now, get penicillin later.
The Other Side of the Story
There is one outstanding problem with “J’s” advice to love-sick young women swingers – it’s totally wrong in at least three fourths of the female cases of gonorrhoea and in many cases of syphilis.
Venereal disease may WELL not be a “feeling that something’s wrong.” It may not be a “sore or discharge” as in about 80 percent of the females infected with gonorrhoea. In a vast number of VD victims, symptoms may not show up for years. Not until a child is born blind or syphilitic – or not born at all due to sterility – will many women know they have VD. Not until a heart attack, insanity or blindness strikes in middle age, will a large number of infected males realise they had the “silent epidemic.”
These and other facts about venereal disease have too often been jammed by misinformation and the playing down of the dire consequences of the play-now-fix-the-results-later philosophy. It is time the seriousness of VD was made clear. It is also time we understood the CAUSE of VD. It goes beyond microbes to the promiscuous sex attitudes held by too many people.
This article will give you these much-ignored warnings from experts, from history, and from those who have suffered. Read this information carefully. Share it with your teen-age children.
The Disease No One Wants to Talk About
Today, as throughout much of history, the silent epidemic of VD is raging. Its delayed-action fuse is carried by millions. VD is still a great crippler and killer – despite medical treatment.
And, yet, strangely enough, little is publicly said about the enormity of its consequences. The Bubonic Plague may be frightful to contemplate – it killed 25,000,000 people in the sixteenth century. In more recent times, the horrible ravages of influenza, German measles or polio have evoked strong cries of alarm.
Yet, there has been a far greater ravager in history – venereal disease. What makes VD even more insidious is its infection pattern. A person may have VD and not know it.
VD Affects Millions
Just since 1900, various forms of syphilis alone have killed approximately 100 million people. During that same time in the United States, it is estimated that syphilis has killed more than three million babies and more than a million adults.
[1] Additional millions have been injured or crippled by the disease or by its sister, gonorrhoea.
Today, despite modern medical treatment, venereal disease is out of control, according to health officials everywhere. In every major nation it infects millions and endangers millions more.
Venereal disease has leapfrogged all other communicable diseases reported in the United States to rank number one in the nation. It is surpassed only by colds and flus, which are not generally reported. (And the VD crisis is approximately the same in most other modern nations. Reported cases reveal only the tip of the iceberg.) Gonorrhoea alone, with its two million new infections annually, is the nation’s most frequently occurring communicable disease among those reported.
In spite of the growing incidence of the disease, ignorance concerning VD abounds – just as in the Middle Ages when it swept away millions and altered history. Too many today seem to have no more regard for or fear of VD than a bad cold, and think it can be cured just as easily. This common attitude alarms many health officials. They know VD’s changing face makes this idea a gross over-simplification.
A Penalty for Promiscuity
From the most ancient annals of civilization to the case histories of the modern medical clinic, venereal disease has been a repugnant and often embarrassing reminder that promiscuity can exact a grievous penalty. The penalty is often paid, unfortunately, not only by the promiscuous individuals, but also by their offspring.
Congenital syphilis may produce a stillborn baby or a live one that looks like a grotesque distortion of a horrible nightmare. Or the baby may appear normal at birth, but weeks, months or years later his face may suddenly become wrinkled or sunken. His shinbones may become deformed, and blindness, deafness, insanity or other signs of syphilis infection may occur. This is a penalty innocently suffered. Yet, one half to two thirds of the babies born alive to mothers with syphilis will bear congenital syphilis in some form.
For untold thousands of careless young girls living today, gonorrhoea has cost them their opportunity to bear children. Their fond hopes of a fulfilling marriage with children have been ruined because their Fallopian tubes were scarred by gonococci, eventually producing irreversible sterility. Today, gonorrhoea is a major cause of sterility in both men and women.
Too many men have “sown wild oats” in adolescence, settled down with a wife, had several children and then were struck down twenty years later, in the prime of life, by a syphilitic heart attack (their aorta turned into a rubbery pulp), or by syphilitic insanity or blindness.
For these victims, VD was a time bomb that exploded disastrously. For millions more today, that time bomb is still ticking.
Testimonies From Two Victims
“I Wish I Were Dead!”
“I am a girl, 18. I had expected to get married this month. My boyfriend broke our engagement because I can’t have children. A few years ago I joined a cult group. We were all promiscuous. I contracted gonorrhoea but I didn’t know it. Last month I had a medical exam and the doctor found it. He said a part of me has become thickened and scarred. It will prevent me from having children. I wish I were dead.”
Virgin With Syphilis
“I am a 14-year-old girl. I have gone with boys since I was 12 and have fooled around a lot but I am still a virgin (technically) and of that I am very sure. I recently went to a clinic and the doctor there told me I had syphilis. I am being treated for it now. If you think this will help other girls who think they can’t get syphilis unless they go all the way, I am telling you they can! I did. Maybe I should explain that I did some heavy petting, and that is how I got it.”
This VD time bomb may be defused without severe effects, even without treatment, but not without the danger of transmission to others. For many, however, the “bomb” will go on ticking away, unnoticed until it explodes over a period of days, months, or years, leaving in its wake irreparable damage, emotional trauma, and possibly death. Meanwhile, the infected individual may be infecting numerous others through carelessness and ignorance.
Vast Reservoir of Infection
In the United States, VD’s number one epidemic position has prompted calls for “national emergency action”. After two decades of decline, reported cases of VD have doubled in the last five years and threaten to double again in three years. In some countries in Africa over two million cases are treated yearly, according to official records. This represents only a fraction of the actual number of cases since many infections remain unreported. Many more are infected but not treated.
No one really knows the extent of the reservoir of infection, but one estimate claims that over 14 million people in Africa carry either syphilis or gonorrhoea, or both. An alarming percentage of victims do not manifest outward signs of infection. In many areas, especially in large urban cities, one out of ten teenagers or young adults may harbour a venereal disease.
Are drugs the perfect solution?
In our era of “miracle” drugs, why has there been a resurgence of venereal disease – especially gonorrhoea? Surprisingly, the “success” of medical science is partly to blame for VD resurgence. But only partly.
The era of penicillin in treating VD started in 1943. Because of it dramatic effect on the course of the disease, many developed false confidence. They thought they could forget about VD as a danger and they were encouraged to engage in promiscuous lifestyles. Along with this euphoria, many felt there was no longer a great need to inform new generations about VD’s crippling and killing potentials
Proper understanding and respect for VD and its subtle dangers fell to a dangerously low level. This attitude largely continues to the present day. In the light of the facts about VD, this false confidence and ignorance have proved to be unfortunate.
Many drugs, particularly penicillin, produced remarkable success in stopping VD infections and in cutting down the severe crippling and death rates caused by VD. But they can prevent serious damage only if applied early enough in detected cases.
Common Misconceptions About Venereal Disease
Contrary to popular myth the professional prostitute is responsible for only about 5 percent of all VD infections. It is true that in pre-penicillin days, the prostitute was a major spreader of the disease, but that is not so today. Now it is the promiscuous boy and girl or man and woman (about 80 percent of the cases) and homosexuals (at least 15 percent of the cases) that have taken over the wholesale propagation of infection.
Some have erroneously thought they could get VD only from females. But in many areas 20 percent or more of the infections are transmitted by homosexual practices. And since male homosexuals usually make more contacts than those involved in heterosexual promiscuous sex, the problem is exploding among them.
Hush-hush attitudes and half-truths about VD have engendered many popular and dangerous myths.
A boy passed his father’s chair and, noticing an article on VD, asked, “What’s this, Dad?” The father hastily folded up the paper and said, “Nothing, son,” Later, he told him, “You don’t have to worry as long as you go with clean girls.”
But syphilis and gonorrhoea transmission have nothing to do with dirt, “clean” appearance or “good” breeding. A shower twice a day means nothing.
Neither does poverty. VD’s association with slums or poverty areas is true to a large extent, but only because these areas concentrate the worst factors that encourage the transmission of the disease – ignorance, careless morality, lack of treatment or lack of education to detect the disease. VD is prevalent in all classes when conditions are met. No race is immune.
Myths About Transmission
It is next to impossible for it to be transmitted by public toilets, dirty door knobs, drinking cups, eating utensils, water, food or air. Even the possibility of transmission by handshaking is remote.
A knowledge of the nature of the syphilis and gonorrhoea organisms shows why. The organisms are fragile outside the human body Removed from human tissues, they die within seconds (or a few minutes at most) upon contact with light, heat, dryness or air. They thrive only at body temperature and cannot survive great fluctuations of temperature. (Once inside the human body, however, they are anything but fragile and delicate. They are one of the hardest organisms for the body to destroy.)
Venereal disease is not self-engendered. It is spread to others by contact with people who have the disease. Syphilis and gonorrhoea microbes grow, in nature, only in humans. They do not naturally infect other animal species and are not known to be spread by them. Overwhelmingly and almost exclusively, they are spread from person to person by sexual intercourse or intimate body contact.
In a case of gonorrhoea infection, no practical immunity develops. In syphilis, although there may be a certain, but imperfect, level of immunity after years of infection, it can be overwhelmed by a large re-infection. If cured early by treatment (before any degree of immunity can be developed) an individual can be immediately re-infected again and again – and many are! Syphilis and gonorrhoea can infect the same person at the same time.
No immunizing vaccine for either exists. (Gonococci characteristics make it an unlikely vaccine candidate. The fragile nature of the syphilis organism outside the human body has not permitted it to be cultured for such a use).
VD is not passed through heredity (by genes), but syphilis can be passed congenitally – that is, to an already developing foetus through the placenta of an infected mother. Syphilis thus contracted without detection can be tragic. In many cases, syphilis germs kill the foetus, causing a miscarriage, abortion or stillbirth, or the disease can cause disfiguring birth defects among live babies.
The contraceptive pill does not prevent VD infection. In fact, it apparently adds an extra susceptibility factor.
As for prophylactics, investigators find many don’t use them, or if they plan to, take risks. No chemical or medical preventive device offers absolute protection from infection. Even the use of male condom is not a 100 percent guarantee against syphilis infection, and depending on how it is used, it may be no protection for gonorrhoea either.
Even then, these drugs are not miracle workers. They cannot replace or restore vital tissue after it has been destroyed by the advanced stages of the disease. After vital tissue is gone, it is irreplaceable. Increasing numbers of treatment failures are also unsettling health officials because of growing cases of drug resistance by the organisms which cause gonorrhoea.
Gonorrhoea, which is by far the biggest VD problem (after HIV/AIDS), is developing high resistant strains to penicillin and to the alternate drugs used by those allergic to penicillin. As a result of resistant strains, one shot or a series of shots may no longer be effective. Some, thinking themselves cured, suffer relapses. Even with syphilis, which is not noticeably resistant to drugs, many months and even years of observation may be required to ensure a cure.
In 1943, a single injection of 100,000 units of penicillin usually stopped gonorrhoea, but today it may go as high as 4.8 million units or more. Some health officials fear we are approaching an upper threshold where the amount of dosage that can be routinely and safely given has been reached.
Losing the Treatment Battle
Many health officials know that treating VD victims is a painstaking, frustrating and often losing battle. By the time most individuals involved in a chain of infection (usually numbering a hundred or more) are contacted and treated, the disease has spread far beyond the group. This is especially true of gonorrhoea, where as little as a three-day incubation period after infection permits the disease to be spread again.
The expense of tracing and contacting individuals can be enormous because some are living in distant cities, states or even other countries. Besides this, many individuals infected each year (12 to 30 percent in some areas) get re-infected within twelve months of treatment – many within one month.
Overconfidence with drugs and growing resistance to drugs are only two aspects related to the VD upsurge. Many infected victims are not found because of the physician’s reluctance to report cases (they report less than 20 percent of the cases) in order to protect client. Victims, as well, often refuse to name, or forget the names, of their contacts. Doctors also often misdiagnose the correct stage of the disease and fail to properly treat the victim.
Moral Climate Encourages the Disease
But much more important today, as throughout history, the VD epidemic is closely tied to certain moral and sexual attitudes.
Today’s relaxed moral climate is encouraging more school children with no knowledge of the disease to carelessly indulge in promiscuous sexual activities. And no wonder. Parents are often as ignorant about VD as their children. Mere children are infected in surprising numbers, such as one five-year-old boy by a nine-year-old girl.
But the big questions remain. Can the scourge of VD be stopped in our generation? Can the concerned individual protect himself? Only if the root cause of the problem is squarely faced and acted upon.
On a national basis, the present approach to VD control insures a bleak future. VD is bound to get worse before it gets better. The VD crisis has been tackled largely by treating infected individuals, encouraging them through informative publications to recognize symptoms.
But early visible symptoms of VD are often not present or paid any special attention. The disease, therefore, continues to be spread unknowingly. While treatment is undoubtedly needed by millions, VD nevertheless is always out-racing treatment. Health authorities point out that no communicable disease has been treated out of existence. They know that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” But prevention obviously means that promiscuous sex acts must be curtailed.
Today’s Wrong Sex Attitudes
VD education is recognized as a desperate need in the home, the school and the Church. But this does not mean solely “information” about its terrible effects. Effective education must face the whole issue and get to the crux of the problem. The educational programme cannot be based merely on a medical or symptomatical point of view. This only treats the effect and not the root cause.
The campaign against VD must be focused not only on microbes, but on morals – especially on wrong sex attitudes and practices. Promiscuous sex habits are the real CAUSE behind VD’s fantastic spread. Unfortunately, it is neither fashionable nor expedient for those who know the consequences of such sex practices to speak out.
We have swung from Victorian prudery to open sexual licence. True Christian – or biblical – morality has been labelled prudishness because it was misinterpreted by traditional Christian moralists.
Seeking to free themselves from prudery, official public agencies, many churches and leaders have come to regard sound teaching of moral values as impractical or even questionable. Too many people hold to the idea that each person must decide upon his own lifestyle. Unfortunately, the consequences of a particular life-style may be very tragic. VD is one of those consequences.
Some researchers, of course, do see the real cause of VD. They are crying in the wilderness that we must have a change in our moral values if we are to prevent the disease. “The chronic venereal disease patient needs an entire moral re-education,” said one doctor in a popular medical journal, after reviewing the problem.
This fact must be squarely faced by the individual who is looking for protection from the plague of VD. The disease, when it strikes, is overwhelmingly the result of factors involving illicit or promiscuous sex relations – pre-marital, extra-marital or homosexual.
Venereal disease organisms my be abundant among persons in a given area, but no transmission of the disease can take place unless sexual or intimate contact is made with infected persons. In the words of one publication of the American Medical Association on the subject: “Married couples who abstain from extra-marital intercourse have no trouble with the disease [if no premarital infection was acquired]. Neither do single people who abstain from sexual congress before marriage.”
This may be an increasingly unpopular view, but it is RIGHT. It is the only sure way to stop the venereal disease upsurge. Even in an age of greater sexual promiscuity, VD is greatly preventable if an individual is living properly.
What the individual does with his own life is his decision. But there are consequences for following a wrong life-style. The effects of sexual promiscuity are clearly documented. What you do with the information from this article is your decision. You must choose whether you will apply it or not.
If you are a parent with adolescent or teenage children, it is the writer’s hope that you will properly teach and instruct them in proper moral values while there is yet time. If you would like further understanding of the vital area of the dangers of promiscuous sex, write for our authoritative booklet, The Scourge of Venereal Diseases. You can have your FREE copy of this important booklet by writing to The Editor, International Christian Digest, P. O. Box 4216, Ilorin, Nigeria. It is hoped that parents will recognize the importance of placing this helpful and informative booklet in the hands of their adolescent children. §§
Facts About Gonorrhoea
Gonorrhoea, commonly called “the clap,” “gleet” or “the drip,” is caused by a germ called gonococcus. It is rarely a killer, but it is a severe crippler and shortener of the life-span. It occurs 10 or more times as frequently as syphilis.
Gonorrhoea organisms can enter the body only through moist membrane openings. The gonococci are parasitic bacterial organisms that live by penetrating cell membranes and absorbing the nutrients they require. Primarily, they settle in the genital areas. Here they can damage the intricate and specially lined areas of the male and female sex organs, especially the female Fallopian tubes through which the female egg must pass. Attempts by the body to heal damaged areas may render a man or woman sterile by closing tubes with thick, fibrous scar tissue. This is a major cause of sterility as well as genital problems occurring years later in life.
Most men readily show symptoms of gonorrhoea infection, although some do not. For women, it is more tragic – about 80 percent show no attention-drawing symptoms. This has produced a dangerous, vast reservoir for potential infection among those engaging in illicit or promiscuous sexual relations. Only after serious damage has been done will many women feel pain and seek treatment.
No Infallible Test
The usually early symptom of gonorrhoea is a copious pus-like discharge from the genitals that occurs from a few days to three weeks after infection. In men, urination usually becomes painful. A smear test is a common, but not infallible, means of confirmation. There is no reliable blood test for gonorrhoea, which means that if the discharge stops, confirmation of the disease may be very difficult. More complicated tests would then be required.
Symptoms may disappear without treatment, buy the victim is usually infectious for many years. The disease may remain dormant (but sexually infectious) until some time in the future when the germs may extend into glands, joints or other organs causing arthritis, heart complications, blindness, brain damage or other chronic conditions such as sterility. Unless immediately treated, most victims of gonorrhoea will suffer some type of tissue damage. This may r may not be serious.
As a result of passage through an infected birth canal, babies are threatened with infection of the eyes and potential blindness within a few days. This used to be a major cause of blindness in children. Since laws have been passed in most states in the US requiring a solution of silver nitrate to be put in the newborn’s eyes, this problem has been significantly reduced. Transfer of the gonococci to the eyes by means of freshly contaminated bedding, towels or hands is always a danger to victims or young children associated with them.
Facts About Syphilis
Syphilis is caused by a spiral shaped organism called a spirochete (spy-ro-keet). It is the most deadly of venereal disease (after HIV/AIDS). Often there are no immediate signs of primary syphilis. The first noticeable sign is usually a sore called chancre (pronounced shan-ker), which takes from 10 to 90 days to develop after contact with an infected person. It usually appears as a painless, itchless blister or sore on the area the spirochete first entered. (If a new victim receives say 1,000 syphilis germs from an initial contact, in three weeks or when the first symptoms are likely to appear, the victim is already carrying five billion or more germs. Yet he may still look and feel healthy).
Frequently, a primary chancre is hidden within the body and goes unnoticed. These symptoms will go away, even if untreated, deceiving many. The disease then spreads to all parts of the body.
The secondary stage may also go unnoticed. Symptoms that do appear may start six weeks to six months after the chancre (all these figures may have wider variations). Lasting from a few days to several months, they usually appear as painless rashes or sores on any part of the body – sores in the mouth, sore throat, falling hair in patches, fever or headaches. These symptoms are often ignored because they are like many other health problems. Again, these symptoms will go away without treatment. But the disease is not cured. (A blood test can often, but not always, confirm an infection. That is why a blood test is required in many states in the US before a marriage can be performed and is one reason blood tests are given to pregnant women).
Transmission by Kissing or Petting
Serious damage usually has not yet occurred. These two stages, lasting about two years but up to four or more, are highly infectious. During this time syphilis can be passed to others through sexual or close intimate personal contact. (Dentists have contracted the disease from a syphilitic lesion in a patient’s mouth when they had a needle prick on their fingers. Intimate kissing can also meet the conditions for transmission, especially if there are cuts or abrasions in the mouth. Cases resulting from petting are also recorded. Abrasive or rough skin contact with a syphilitic lesion is also dangerous.)
Untreated, the disease may go into a non-infectious early latent period. It sometimes reverts to an infectious second stage, but usually it proceeds into a late latent stage (considered non-infectious sexually, but infectious congenitally in women). Here it may lay from five to forty years or more without notice, only to finally attack vital organs as late syphilis, producing heart problems, blindness, crippling, paralysis, insanity or death.
Many “Luck Out”
One half to two-thirds of all cases of syphilis at any time are in the dormant state. For some reason not fully understood, about 80 percent of the untreated victims of syphilis “luck out.” They do not suffer the ravages of late syphilis. Some authorities feel sufficient immunity may be developed, or the spirochete and the body tissues may attain a state of equilibrium – a sort of shaky truce. Some doctors think reactivation occurs when body resistance has been lowered, such as from fighting another disease.
The remaining 20 percent or so of the untreated victims will suffer destructive lesions: cardiovascular (syphilitic heart disease or rupture of an artery), disease of the central nervous system (brain or spinal cord), benign gummas ( a growth of rubbery consistency) or tumours on skin or bones, eye problems or other crippling or killing late lesions.
Nearly $50 million is spent annually to care for those rendered insane by syphilis. Many millions more are spent for the care of syphilitic blind people. In congenital syphilis, an infant may show lesions at birth or may appear normal at birth, then develop lesions in a few months. The individual may appear normal into adolescence when, undetected, deformity, blindness, insanity, or early syphilis symptoms may strike. One half or more of all infants born alive to syphilitic mothers will have congenital syphilis in one form or another.
