• Question: Where do STD's originate from?

    Asked by bthomas to Amy, Drew, Julia, Kimberley, Sara on 19 Jun 2011. This question was also asked by taljeda.
    • Photo: Sara Imari Walker

      Sara Imari Walker answered on 18 Jun 2011:

      Hello btomas and taljeda! There are a lot of causes for STDs. STD (or now called STIs I hear, for sexually transmitted infections) are illnesses that have a significant risk of transmission between humans by means of human sexual behavior. They have a lot of causes, bacterial, fungal, viral – just like any other class of infections. Since you are asking “where” do they come from I am thinking you are most interested in their root, why do they exist at all in the first place? Well just like other illnesses we get, the infection may be bad for us, but it is good for the infecting agent. For example in a bacterial infection, we get sick specifically because the infecting bacteria are thriving. This is therefore evolutionarily advantageous for the bacteria! So they keep doing it. They will live in a host and wait for the opportunity to spread to another. Now why then use sexual transmission as a means to hop from human to human? Well, probably for one it is because all humans do it – and your target is healthy adult humans which means they are probably nice comfy places to live. Another is that they don’t have to leave the comfort bodily fluids provide to change hosts this way. So this is a really efficient means for them. Probably in the distant past someone became infected by a bacteria that mutated and realized that sexual transmission was the way to go, and the STD was born.

    • Photo: Julia Griffen

      Julia Griffen answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      I like Sara’s answer…
      Just like our digestive system contains millions of bacteria (we’ve all herd the term friendly bacteria from those yogurt adverts!).. What i’m getting at… so do our reproductive organs. Not to be too grossed out, but we are meant to have bacteria there to keep us clean and healthy.
      Therefore our reproductive organs are excellent breading growns for bacteria, warm and damp! So if we get infected both bacterial and viral or fungal they can multiply and take hold quite easily… Sounds quite gross huh 😛

    • Photo: Amy MacQueen

      Amy MacQueen answered on 19 Jun 2011:

      Hey! The othert guys have given good answers on this – most STDs have been living with us too long to trace them back to a definitive start point…and that first person is long dead so we can’t examine them to see exactly what went on!! The only recent sexually transmitted disease that can be traced back epedemiologically some way is HIV which originated in Africa and is similar to a disease found in monkeys called SIV. 🙂

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