average number of sexual encounters before STD

[Dak]

After a scare that turned out to just be a cyst (which still isn't a fun thing to have on your penis btw), I got wondering: on average, how many one-night stands do you have to have before you get a viral STD?

 

I was expecting it to not be a strait-forward answer, but I can't find any answer anywhere... anyone got any ideas?

 

I'm asking because I usually use a condom (long-term girlfriends excluded), but occasionally don't. I figure that if the answers, e.g., 10, then i'll have to aim to have sex w/out a condom so rarely that I only do it, say, 5 times in my life so as to minimize the risk of an incurable disease. If the answer's 20, I can do it twice as often whilst still probably not getting a viral STD.

 

(not looking for 'always wear a condom' btw, had enough of that from the nurse that'd just violated me with a coctail stick, especially since i've never had the clap)

[John Cuthber]

It depends whom you are sleeping with.

How bad do the risks need to be before you realise that a potentially life threatening risk isn't worth it?

[tomgwyther]

Nice to see someone's getting some. What bars are you going to with easy women?

I'm tempted to accompany you next time; wait until you need the bathroom. Then move in on your prospective mate and explain how 'He's sizing up the statistical probability of you giving him an STD'

Whilst simultaneously offering better odds on my - well protected - self.

 

At school, we once played a game whereby the teacher told us to shake hands with six different people, and remember with whom we'd shaken hands.

Then she picked one student from the class, had them stand at the front and said

"This person has an STD, could the six people who shook his hand please stand up."

To which six people stood up. The she asked

"Could anyone who shook hands with any of the now standing people also stand up."

To which a much larger group now stood. This went on so on and so forth until over half the room of about 200 students - ws now standing. thus demonstrating the spread of STDs

 

Given that about one in five people* have an STD, your chances of contracting a nasty disease must go up exponentially with every non-protected encounter you have.

 

* http://www.livestrong.com/article/13924-std-information/

[Marat]

Since our Puritanical society still hates sex, it naturally exaggerates the physical risks associated with sex, since it constantly seeks for some objective reason to discourage sex which can reinforce the constantly weakening force of the moral reasons against it. Most STDs are either completely curable or of minor significance (syphillis, gonorrhea, yaws, herpes) so it is not necessary to worry much about them. The serious STD, AIDS, is minimally transmissible to males by ordinary sexual intercourse. I have seen the figure quoted that there are NO cases of males who have developed AIDS from conventional sexual intercourse with a female in North America (where parasitic infections don't generally serve to make AIDS more communicable). This is not what they tell you in high school health classes, of course, but then again, a survey of American Medical students in 1959 showed that half of them were sure that masturbation was physically harmful.

[Dak]

How bad do the risks need to be before you realise that a potentially life threatening risk isn't worth it?

 

Depends how fun it is. I dunno, 1/1000 maybe? I mean, 'risk of death' is only the same as drinking, taking drugs, or crossing the road: you can't shouldn't just ignore risk, but you can't just avoid it either.

 

Note that even with a condom, nasty STD's are a possibility -- even if it doesn't break (scrotal herpies, for example).

 

Since our Puritanical society still hates sex, it naturally exaggerates the physical risks associated with sex, since it constantly seeks for some objective reason to discourage sex which can reinforce the constantly weakening force of the moral reasons against it.

 

Not saying you haven't got a point about society being prudish, but read into the friendship paradox. Not only have your facebook friends got more friends on average than you, but your sexual partners will have had sex on average a lot more than you have, which exaggerates the risk.

 

Effectively: if you shag someone w/out a condom, it's probably because they shag a lot of people without a condom, not because you're special and they made an exception for you. Hence, it's not neccesarily the case that doing it a few times is a dead-certain way to get the clap, but it's riskier than you're thinking. Hence why I want some kind of knowledge as to the actual risk.

 

 

Most STDs are either completely curable or of minor significance (syphillis, gonorrhea, yaws, herpes) so it is not necessary to worry much about them.

 

Herpies is not curable. I'd be interested to hear an argument as to it's 'minor significance'.

 

Syph is only of minor significance if you either identify it early on, or don't mind your bones and brain being gnawed on. If it goes undiagnosed, then it can still be cured, but the symptoms (blindness, insanity, etc) cannot be reversed.

 

The serious STD, AIDS, is minimally transmissible to males by ordinary sexual intercourse. I have seen the figure quoted that there are NO cases of males who have developed AIDS from conventional sexual intercourse with a female in North America (where parasitic infections don't generally serve to make AIDS more communicable).

 

Do you have a citation. 'cos i'm pretty sure you're wrong.

 

Seriously, from someone who I hope it's obvious isn't 'prudish', your attitude towards not getting teh clap sucks. Go to a clinic and get checked out if you haven't already...

 

Given that about one in five people* have an STD, your chances of contracting a nasty disease must go up exponentially with every non-protected encounter you have.

 

 

not exponentially. assuming 1/5 STD instance, the chance of two randomly picked women not having an STD is nearer 1/3 than 2/5

 

Also, as I have regularish checkups, i'm not so conserned about bacterial infections like chlamydia and syph, more the incurable viral ones

 

btw, i'm a bit suspicious about your link:

1/5 people have an STD in the US;

1/5 people have herpies in the US;

HPV and chlamydia are the most common STDs in the US;

therefore, more people have HPV than herpies

therefore, more than 1/5 people have HPV

therefore, more people have HPV than have an STD???

[lemur]

My impression is that the more you have sex, the more it becomes unsatisfying to have to use a condom. The same may true of regularly changing partners. If you are used to the excitement of a new partner to keep sex interesting, isn't it going to become increasingly boring to stick with the same partner for a long time, let alone settle down in a permanent monogamous relationship? Once you find that monogamy is unsatisfying relative to your previous sexual experience, and sex with a condom is unsatisfying compared to sex without, aren't you going to need more and more unprotected sex with rotating partners to feel happy about your sex life? If your partners are doing the same, isn't it just a matter of time before someone introduces HIV or other nasty diseases into the circuit? I had to think about this recently when I heard that the porn industry shut down because someone tested positive for HIV. Can you imagine what anyone who has worked in porn without a condom (or even with one for that matter) must have gone through at the moment that news came out?

Edited November 29, 2010 by lemur

[Marat]

If you accept Wikipedia as a source which is at least universally accessible, the AIDS transmission risk seems quite low. If you have sex with females in Europe or North America, their HIV incidence is much lower than the world average, but just to be generous to the alarmists, let's assume that they share the world's 0.6% risk of seropositivity for HIV. The risk of HIV transmission to a man during a single incident of vaginal intercourse with an HIV-positive woman is 0.04%. Multiplying that low rate of transmission by the low incidence of HIV infection, you have only a .024% chance of getting HIV from a single random case of sex with a woman. Another way to look at this datum is that if you have unprotected sex with 400 women, your HIV risk is still only 10%.

 

The serious risks for AIDS are only in Third World countries where parasitic infections have made AIDS more transmissible, where people have suppressed immune systems from malnutrition or generally poor hygiene, or where the mechanism of transmission is blood transfusion, being the passive partner to male penetration, anal intercourse, rough intercourse which induces bleeding, or intercourse in the presence of bleeding sores from other STDs.

[kiore]

I must say I have concerns re this topic, the average number should you establish it, is a population health statistic, not an individual risk calculation.

If we were to establish say that it would take in a given population, 10 'encounters' to contract a sexually transmitted infection, this does not mean you can have 9 and be safe..

Having worked in the field of sexual health for many years I have seen people contract infections (whatever they were) on their first or their hundredth.

The individual risk is individual and using population statistics to calculate individual risk is a nonsense.

Take life expectancy as an example, we know that Japanese have a longer life expectancy than say Sudanese, but a Japanese individual sitting next to a Sudanese individual in a plane crash has no individual advantage of survival due to their predicted 50% longer life expectancy.

A thousand ( or a million) unprotected sexual encounters with uninfected individuals will result in no infection, while a single encounter with an infected individual could.