The
safer sex era - and after
These events and the research into preventive strategies and ‘Contact
Tracing’ influenced the 1968 and 1974 National Health Service
(Venereal Diseases) Regulations that promoted further to development
of the sexual health services into the kind of clinics available
today.
With the advent of HIV in the early 1980s, the resulting prevention
campaigns, and a rise in public awareness, there was a dramatic
decrease in both syphilis and gonorrhoea that continued until 1993.
But from 1993, there was a slow but steady increase in the number
of cases of gonorrhoea. Whilst this rise was reported on a year-by-year
basis, the trend and its possible significance was not emphasised
until a 1999 publication from the Public Health Laboratory Service
(PHLS).
In its review of the data collected in the previous
six years, the PHLS alerted the nation to a 39 per cent increase
in rectal gonorrhoea reports between 1993 and 1999 and a 60 per
cent increase in gonorrhoea reports in gay men in the Thames (London)
region during the same period.
The authors of the report said that some of this increase may have
been due to more stringent reporting requirements for gonorrhoea
that were introduced in 1995. Nonetheless, the report showed that
in 1998 there were just over 13,000 reports of gonorrhoea and in
1999, 16,500 - an increase of 25 per cent in only one year.
These figures were indications that the changes in sexual behaviour
during the late 80s and early 90s were not being sustained.
The latest figures
This trend seems to have been further emphasised by this summer’s
report from the PHLS.
The data shows that the diagnoses of gonorrhoea have risen by eight
per cent in men and six per cent in women between 2000 and 2001.
Genital chlamydia is also very high with a total of 71,055 |
