Why is syphilis on the rise? | Hacker News Reader

Why is syphilis on the rise?

bbc.co.uk

50 pointspmoriarty23 comments

In Sweden, I'd say it's mostly due to the immigration. The prevalence is much higher, unfortunately also strands that are harder to treat. It's not only stds, also other diseases such as hepatitis and tuberculosis etc, but it's not really addressed. No mandatory health checks, etc, that could help. Not totally sure why, it's a known fact and shouldn't be a touchy subject.

Edit: Oh, and Grinder is probably not helping in certain demographics...

Also, compared to today, there was such a scare when I grew up regarding HIV and AIDS, with non stop campaigns for safe sex. It really made us more careful and more worried.

My guess would be that because more people are on PrEP, fewer people are using condoms.

For the hacker news crowd, I think this would be a very interesting data mining project: correlate the prevalence of bareback gay porn with overall rates of bacterial STDs.

In the late 90s and early 00s, gay bareback porn was quite rare, and it was mainly "vintage" porn from before the AIDS epidemic. There were some studios around the mid 00s I think that focused on bareback sex, which caused lots of controversy in the time before PreP. Since PreP became widespread in the past couple years, bareback porn has become very common.

I don't think anyone consciously thinks "Oh, that porn star didn't use a condom, I don't need one either." But I think the overall change does tend to desensitize people into just making the negative consequences of barebacking easier to forget.

Doesn't this approach have the same issue as trying to correlate violent video games with actual violence?

While you could argue that, you could also argue that this activity is prevalent in a 'very similar' way in the consumer's life already. Not so much for violence.

Watching porn makes people horny. Watching violence does not make people aggressive and murderous.

I think both are in the same category. Being horny is like being violent. If you don't have access to a partner or a weapon then your just an angry dude in a dark room fapping into the abyss.

According to accepted psychological research ... it does. Well, not murderous, as that sort of research would never get approved.

But aggressive ? Certainly.

Why can't people accept this ? It's the very idiotically basis of how the human mind works: it learns. 99.99% of the time it learns by imitating something else. Give it something violent to imitate (no matter how artificial, fake, drawn, ...), and ... surprise ! It will come up with more violent answers in the future. How is this strange or unexpected in the least ?

And yes, I get it, you feel like you are in control of your own mind. By the way, how do you explain how advertising works if that were true ? Or the obvious influence mass media have ? Or why absurdly large groups of people keep coming to the same conclusion (from culture, to political "winds", to google searches ... all shows strong correlations between huge groups of people).

Now granted, this is results like 10% more likely to use minor violence in a "get something taken from me" situation among children (the other alternative generally being getting adult help, which may or may not cooperate depending on the study). None of those studies are saying Rambo turns toddlers into terminators. But objectively, measurably more violent ? Yes, yes it does. It does so heavily in the short term (hours), then the effect slowly dies down (but it's still significant 20 years after the exposure).

This has been incredibly thoroughly tested and yes, we are VERY sure this does in fact happen.

Their best guess is that group sex among men enabled by hookup apps and enhanced by “chemsex” (where inhibitions are counteracted by drug usage) in conjunction with cutbacks in health spending have resulted in an increase in incidence.

In regards to both the headline (syphilis) and chlamydia it seems to be limited to male-male hookup apps while it stayed the same largely for heterosexual and female-female hookups. Even though one would assume all parties had equally greater access to random hookups thanks to apps. Im genuinely curious why that is. Tinder has most certainly made anonymous hookups more socially acceptable for straight people. Or is this just one of those cultural trends which impact gay culture first, before it reaches mainstream culture, as happens (stereotypically) with fashion, music, and other trends?

MSM are generally more interested in hookups that involve barebacking because it is considered both more pleasurable and more 'dirty', and MSM are not likely to get pregnant. IIRC MSM also have many more partners than either heterosexuals or WLW.

MSM until very recently had a very big incentive to use condoms in the form of HIV, but these days PrEP is widespread and not expensive, so that risk has largely abated.

Because it evolved. You cannot outrun these.

You absolutely can. If the U.K. made extramarital sex illegal and enforced it syphilis cases would fall. There are plenty of other less drastic measures that would have the same directional effect.

Evolution isn’t magic. The USA used to have malaria. Now it doesn’t.

Because that certainly worked for the past 2,000 years. Must be why nobody ever had syphilis when extramarital sex actually was illegal. Oh wait.

Infections would fall by the amount caused by extramarital sex, multiplied by the probability that people are actually deterred by illegality, plus network effects. That won't completely eradicate syphilis, but still lower the numbers.

I suggest you learn to read more carefully. I did not suggest syphilis would be eliminated by making extramarital sex illegal. I said its incidence would be reduced. If you make something more expensive people do less of it. Fewer people smoke marijuana now than will once it’s legal because part of the cost is the possibility of a criminal record and all that entails.

The USA isn't really a hotbed of mosquito infestation. Very little of the contiguous US is in a tropical climate zone.

Not really commenting on the GP post, but your comment isn't correct. Malaria used to be very common in the Southeastern US. During the Civil War thousands died from malaria. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Malaria_Eradication...

Malaria is not limited to the tropics and historically was common in parts of Europe and North America, and likely even in what is now the United Kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_malaria

http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/949/663

We could also chemically castrate everyone through the water supply.

I mean, we should keep all our options on the table.

The Nazis shot people in the head for extra-marital sex. But they never got a handle on the problem. And to be honest, I doubt we can bring more ruthlessness to bear on the problem than they managed.

To paraphrase Darwin: if extramarital sex is outlawed, only outlaws will have extramarital sex.

And looking at other apes for a (very) rough metric, it's really hard to run against evolution when evolution's selected for...at least a certain genetic strain that leans toward non-monogamy. Interestingly enough, many bird species, while mating for life, are not sexual monogamous in that period.

The real question is: what're we going to to with all those chlamydia-infected koala bears?

>The Nazis shot people in the head for extra-marital sex.

I can find zero statements outside this comment on HN backing up or even implying any sort of punishment relatively close to this absolutely absurd statement. Nazism wasn't some cartoonishly evil villain. Propping it up as such is dangerous because it makes people see it as an absurd historical event that is too crazy to be repeated.

As far as I can tell, the Nazis were still using https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_f%C3%BCr_das_..., which punishes adultery with up to 6 months in prison, but only if someone (presumably the cheated spouse) files a suit.

Better approach in my mind is to develop vaccines.

Last I checked marriage is by no means an STI preventing form of contraception so I think you mean monogamous relationship. As many people are in happy monogamous relationships with no intent for marriage because of a variety of reasons.

It's not entirely clear to me how you would even go about enforcing such a law. Why would either participant report their "crime"? Isn't that effectively what Judeo-Christian beliefs have encouraged since their inception?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com