salt_marsh
Forum Replies Created
There are two other drugs in the same family used as a single dose, and one of them has a much longer half life, which is the idea behind giving it once.
Availability varies a lot by country and one of them is considerably more expensive than the standard option, so what you can actually be offered depends on where you are.
For HPV testing, self collected vaginal samples perform very well, and that is why guidelines and regulators have moved on this. Self collection in a clinic was approved first, and at home collection followed.
The distinction worth holding: it is an HPV test, not a cytology test. If the HPV result is positive you will usually still need a clinic appointment for the next step.
The shortage is real and it has been running for a while. Manufacturers have given recovery estimates that keep moving, and health departments in several countries have issued guidance on how to prioritise the supply that exists.
Doxycycline is the established alternative for people who cannot have penicillin, so it is not improvised. Its evidence base is thinner than for penicillin, which is the honest caveat.
The omissions are mostly deliberate rather than an oversight. Blood testing everyone for herpes, for instance, produces a lot of ambiguous results and very little that changes what anyone does, which is why most guidelines advise against it as routine screening.
Because this organism has developed resistance to nearly everything that used to work orally. The injected drug has held up where the tablets stopped being reliable, so guidelines moved to it as first line.
It is not about severity. It is about what still works.
Typically weeks to months, but it can be much longer, and in some cases the virus sits without producing anything at all for a long time before something appears.
This is why working backwards to a specific person almost never produces a reliable answer.
That number matters more than the word next to it. Results just over the threshold on the common antibody test have a substantial false positive rate, and this is a known and documented weakness rather than a rare fluke.
Guidance in several places is that low positive results should be confirmed with a different kind of test before anyone accepts the diagnosis.
It is also one of the reasons the treatment recommendation shifted towards the seven day course. A single dose is noticeably less reliable at that site, which mattered once people started actually looking there.
Take the medication as prescribed and attend the monitoring appointments. That is genuinely most of it.
Undetectable is not a state you maintain by effort in any other sense. It is the result of the drug keeping the virus suppressed, confirmed by blood tests at intervals your clinic sets.
Connected, most likely. Patchy hair loss with a moth eaten appearance is a described feature of secondary syphilis and it can affect scalp, eyebrows and beard.
It generally regrows after treatment, though it takes months rather than weeks.
It is associated with preterm birth and low birth weight in observational studies, which is why it is treated rather than left.
The evidence on whether treating it during pregnancy improves those outcomes is genuinely mixed, which may be why you got a short answer. Treatment is still recommended, partly for your symptoms and partly to stop transmission.
It is the type most strongly associated with cervical cancer and with HPV related cancers generally, and it does carry more risk than the other high risk types. That is why some programmes triage it differently.
What has not changed is that most infections with it still clear, and that the pathway from persistent infection to cancer is long and screened.
Your friend is wrong, and it is a common and consequential misunderstanding. PrEP is for HIV and nothing else.
Chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis, herpes and HPV are all unaffected by it, which is why regular screening is built into PrEP care rather than being optional.
Visible warts do generally mean more virus present at that site, so yes, transmission is thought to be more likely when lesions are present than when they are not.
But the framing of dangerous is not useful here. These are extremely common viruses and most people acquire some type at some point.
That is a recognised finding with this infestation and it has a name in the literature. The marks are a reaction at bite sites and they are harmless.
They can persist for weeks to months after successful treatment, which catches people out because they look like something is still happening.
You have understood it correctly. Cure rates at the rectal site are lower than at genital sites, which is why several guidelines single it out for a repeat test while not asking for one routinely elsewhere.
The timing matters: too soon and the test can still pick up dead organism rather than live infection, which is why they give you a date rather than saying come back whenever.
Some hysterectomies leave the cervix in place, and in that case screening carries on as normal. Plenty of people do not know which operation they had, so it is a fair question to ask.
Also wait until symptoms have resolved, if you had any. The week is a minimum rather than a guarantee.
You are not stupid. Painlessness is precisely why the primary sore gets missed, and it heals on its own regardless of treatment, which makes it look resolved.
That combination is the single biggest reason people present later in the course than they would like.
Genital herpes does not pass through breast milk, so having it is not a reason not to breastfeed.
The exception is a lesion on the breast itself, which would mean avoiding feeding from that side until it has healed. That is uncommon but it is the specific thing to watch for.
The absence of symptoms is not a reason to skip treatment. You would be treated as a contact regardless, and that is the standard approach.
They are following the guidance. Warts are caused by low risk types that are not associated with cervical cancer, so a wart diagnosis on its own does not change screening intervals anywhere I know of.
What changes your interval is what the screening test itself finds.
It does. Anal HPV in women is common, and women with a history of high grade cervical or vulvar disease are recognised as being at increased risk of anal disease.
Recent screening guidance from specialist societies includes groups beyond men who have sex with men for exactly this reason.
The things that matter with prolonged untreated infection are ascending infection, which in women means pelvic inflammatory disease and its consequences, and in men epididymitis. Rarely it spreads to the bloodstream and joints.
But most of that is a risk rather than an inevitability, and plenty of people have carried it for months without lasting damage.
Practical points that come up repeatedly: keep medication in hand luggage rather than checked bags, keep it in the original labelled packaging, and take more than the trip length in case of delays.
A letter from your clinic confirming you are prescribed it is worth having even if nobody asks.