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he waiting room o Barcelona’s Unit or Sexually Transmit-ted Inections (UITS) is ull o people and yet completely si-lent. The patients waiting are mostly men with a ew womenamongst them, a small group that represents an impressive range oages and races. In the city’s STD clinic there is no conusion aboutwhat the wait is or. But unlike other patients readily sharing the de-tails o their suerings with one another, the STD patients kill timelooking at AIDS prevention brochures and condom posters.Once behind closed doors, one-on-one with the medical sta,they don’t eel any discomort going into detail about their symp-toms and the stories that produced them. “It is one o the things Ilove about my job,” said María Jesús Barberá, director o the unit.“Absolute strangers talk about sex with me openly and withoutholding back.”These urgent conversations about sex keep the our doctors andour nurses o the clinic busy ull time, more so with every passingyear. The rise in the number o sexually transmitted diseases is atendency not only in Spain, but also in the rest o Europe, said Bar-berá. Since 2000, every year has seen an increase in the number opatients. In 2007, the Barcelona clinic had 24,000 visits compared tosome 15,000 in 2004. Such statistics come as a bit o a shock giventhe expansive outreach o STD educational campaigns and the un-precedented level o sex literacy. How is it possible that peoplecontinue to suer an ever-growing number o sexually transmit-ted inections?Partly it is because advances in HIV antiviral medicationmean AIDS patients have been living more healthily and witha much lower risk o mortality in recent years. As a result,people have become less earul about the deadly disease.Condoms are being ignored more oten than they shouldbe, warned Barberá. In addition, many people continueto subscribe to the erroneous idea that oral sex is saesex, while in reality many STDs (like gonorrhea,syphilis and genital herpes) are easily transmittedthrough oral sex practices, especially to men. Us-

Report

The number o Barcelona residents suering romsexually transmitted diseases continues to rise.By Steana Serafna. Photos by Suzannah Larke.

Bad sex

...many people continue tosubscribe to the erroneous ideathat oral sex is safe sex...

16-18 sex diseases-3 new.indd 3421/11/08 15:46:43

Report

ing a condom while practising oral sex is the only way to be com-pletely sae.Finally, a big actor in the rise o sexually transmitted inections isthe growing number o people who change partners with regularity,or have more than one at a time. No matter how insistently the doc-tors might advise sticking with old-ashioned monogamous behav-iour, the reality o modern metropolitan lie is quite dierent. Beingone o Europe’s most desirable tourist destinations, Barcelona alsoranks high among the Old Continent’s party and romance capitals.Endless nights spark new connections and, urther ueled by a lot o‘Sex on the Beach’ cocktails, they quickly grow into one-night aairswhose heroes and heroines oten end up in the UITS waiting room.Gay men requent Barcelona’s clinic most oten. Men make upbetween 60 and 70 percent o the unit’s patients, and homosexualsare largely responsible or the high number. Gay men oten have agreater number o partners and are exposed to more aggressive in-ections because o their sex practices. This year, along with the morecommon STDs, the Barcelona unit has registered an outbreak o anewer disease amongst gay patients, which has only recently becomeknown in Europe. LGV (or

linfogranuloma venereo

) is an inectioninvolving the rectum and can have severe complications i not treat-ed in a timely manner.The other STDs on the list are the usual suspects. At the top othe chart or the most common ones in Barcelona are genital warts,ollowed by syphilis, gonorrhea, genital herpes, chlamydia and HIV.And having any o these inections makes a person more susceptibleto others. Many times a patient diagnosed with syphilis, or example,will have also contracted the HIV virus.“Another thing people don’t seem to ully grasp is that a lot othe commonly known sexually transmitted inections are silent andinvisible,” added Barberá. “They can live in one’s body withoutsymptoms. This makes them easier to pass to a partner as the virusand bacteria carriers are unaware o their existence. The bacteriacausing syphilis and gonorrhea, or example, can thrive in the throatand the mouth without making one eel sick or uncomortable. and itbecomes easy or the inections to be transmitted through oral sex.“The asymptomatic nature o some inections makes them notonly easier to pass on, but dangerous or the complications that mayoccur later, particularly in women. They may suer a higher risk ocervical cancer, pelvic inammation and sterility, among other con-sequences.”She also noted that doctors oten miss important clues when itcomes to diagnosing STDs. Doctors without a speciality in the feldmay not listen careully enough to patients, or examine them com-

The use o a condom has twoimmediate benefts: it pro-tects against disease and pre-vents unwanted pregnancy. As the number o abortionsperormed on teenagers risesyear ater year, Catalan au-thorities want to increase con-dom usage among sexuallyactive teenagers, and recentlyannounced that 150 newcondom dispensers wouldbe installed in places whereyoung people can accessthem, such as public librariesand metro stations. They willoer condoms at prices rang-ing between 30 and 50 centsapiece. Currently, accordingan article in

La Vanguardia

,there are 520 such machinesin Catalunya.

An ounceof prevention