Venereal Disease

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31169, 20 September 1966, Page 14

Venereal Disease

Sir, —The only sane way to instruct young people in matters of sex is by giving proper sex education, which should include information on venereal disease. The attempt to frighten youngsters into not having intimate relations, to speak chastely, fails. “M.B.S.’s” view of chasity as the “only successful type of sex education” is typical of the puritanical perceptions still found in many parts of our society. Our Latin American neighbours who practise a more realistic outlook could teach us plenty. Newspapers and magazines are crammed with “sex and its accompaniments.” While this is appreciated, because it often helps to focus the situation, we should not hesitate, either, to print instructions about the prevention of venereal diseases for those who do engage in pre-nu.rital sexual activities. An effort in this direction could well erase venereal diseases within the next 50 years. But only if we wake up from our Rip van Winkle doze. —Yours, etc., D. BOHRINGER. Oamaru, September 17, 1966.

Sir, —Is it not possible that the medical profession’s disregard of the fact that social diseases can be contracted from non-sexual contact, and consequent public apathy to hygiene, are at least partly responsible for the rocketing incidence of venereal disease in New Zealand? The organism causing syphilis lives only briefly after leaving the human body—or the test tube. Nevertheless, authenticated cases are on record of contagion resulting from nonsexual contact. I should think the same would be even more true of what the North Canterbury Hospital Board venereologist calls “paratypes” and mycotic infections. I have known nurses who would never risk using a bath in a hotel or on a steamer. They would shower instead. Moral standards are not what they were. Social workers tell us most women students lose virginity, and natural protection against venereal disease, before graduation. Moral rearmament and increased public attention to hygiene would appear to be urgently required.—Yours, etc., CITIZEN. September 12, 1966. [Dr W. M. Platts replies: “Inanimate objects play no part in the transfer of venereal disease, and therefore increased public attention to hygiene would have no effect on the incidence. Syphilis can be caught extra-genitally, but only by direct skin contact with a syphilitic sore or infected body fluid such as blood. The belief that toilets, towels, baths, drinking vessels, etc., can become infected and cause V.D. is a popular fallacy. However some of the paravenereal group, notably pubic lice and possibly Trichomonas vaginale, can be caught by other means. Finally there is no natural protection against gonorrhoea

-nor, for practical purposes, against syphilis, both of which confer no immunity and can be caught an indefinite number of times.”]