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It looks like more and more people are delaying marriage until beyond the age of 30 but yet it is still uncommon for people to retain their virginity at that point, according to the "official" stats. This means that a startingly high number of people are putting their health on the line. It even seems like in many social circles, "dating" has become synonymous with a sexual relationship. I'm also seeing stats showing that condom use among young adults seems to often be inconsistent. Given that some diseases can actually cause damage to your body even without having symptoms, how do so many people sleep at night not knowing whether they are being destroyed from the inside by these microbes?
Serious question. I am a former hypochondriac but consider myself fully recovered. Yet I am 37 and simply cannot imagine wanting to lose my virginity unless the partner is willing to take a few medical tests first at my expense (At minimum, HIV, syphilis, and gonorrhea, preferably also hep B, HPV, and chlamydia). I perceive that this is uncommon in our society. What gives? I am especially wondering in light of the continuing emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of just about everything, making it hard to simply assume that you'll just chance it and then pop your meds afterward.
So, particularly for those of you who delayed marriage until beyond age 30 but lost your virginity at a "typical" age, how did you convince yourself that the risk was low enough? Or did you not think through it that far?
Serious question. I am a former hypochondriac but consider myself fully recovered. Yet I am 37 and simply cannot imagine wanting to lose my virginity unless the partner is willing to take a few medical tests first at my expense (At minimum, HIV, syphilis, and gonorrhea, preferably also hep B, HPV, and chlamydia).
I am a former hypochondriac (maybe not so much 'former')but consider myself fully recovered.
Yet I am 37 and simply cannot imagine wanting to lose my virginity unless ...
That isn't hypochondria.
Having sex at young ages, and using (or not) the well know protections,
a blood test now and then ... are ALL well within the range of NORMAL and COMMON human behavior.
Start with such as the premise and reconsider what your Q is.
Can't say I really was thinking about STDs at 13 all that much. The hormones did the thinking back then. 80% of men and 90% of women have STDs so, eh. YOLO?
Serious question. I am a former hypochondriac but consider myself fully recovered. Yet I am 37 and simply cannot imagine wanting to lose my virginity unless the partner is willing to take a few medical tests first at my expense (At minimum, HIV, syphilis, and gonorrhea, preferably also hep B, HPV, and chlamydia). I perceive that this is uncommon in our society. What gives? I am especially wondering in light of the continuing emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of just about everything, making it hard to simply assume that you'll just chance it and then pop your meds afterward.
Just simply from the testing aspects it is less than optimal to do so. There isn't any screening for males for HPV.
All tests are designed to optimize the detection of diseased populations. One is able to determine the positive and negative predictive value of a test on how well it does so. In order to do so one correlates a person with symptoms that may or may not be an STD and then does testing to confirm the presence of an STD. If testing comes up positive then one assigns the symptoms as being attributed to the presence of an STD. That is the optimal usage of a test in general.
When a person does not have disease, which is the difference between STD and STI, then that is when the positive and negative predictor takes a hit. One is testing the general population without symptoms and runs into higher false positives and false negatives.
STI testing is in most cases simply one test that determines a positive or negative. In general lab testing, one likes to see multiple tests imply a disease condition. It's better to be redundant but that doesn't exist with STI positive and negative testing which is why symptoms rather than other tests is used.
"Although most nucleic acid amplification tests used for diagnosis of chlamydia and gonorrhea in Canada have excellent clinical sensitivity and specificity (> 95%),2 they may still generate false-positive results when used in a population with low prevalence of these diseases. Consider the example of female vaginal swabs taken for chlamydia testing in a population with a 1.5% prevalence of chlamydia (within the estimate indicated in the screening recommendations). Using a test with 97.2% sensitivity and 98.5% specificity,3 the positive and negative predictive values are 49.7% and 99.9%, respectively. That means the chance that a positive result is a false positive is greater than 50%."
Those are the technical issues with the tests. One then moves on to issues of trust and that takes a hit. Will you then be able to trust that individual?
Just to let you know what you are getting into.
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