Can You Get Gonorrhea From French Kissing

Pictured above: Not all types of kissing feature the exchange of saliva. From https://twitter.com/CDCSTD/status/728408953818775552

Some pretty depressing news striking a couple of months ago, when headlines proclaimed kissing could let gonorrhea to jump from 1 person to another.

Nosotros already knew gonorrhea could exist transmitted during oral sex — a terrible fact, given that most people don't utilize condoms or dental dams during oral sex. And nosotros knew that oral gonorrhea is more probable to develop drug resistance, which could be helping to bulldoze the possibly untreatable gonorrhea of the near futurity.

Mouth-to-mouth kissing could be transmitting gonorrhea right under our noses — literally.

Gonorrhea is most famous equally an infection of the cervix or the urethra. Only the leaner that cause gonorrhea tin thrive in other warm, moist areas of your body — non just the reproductive tract, just also in the oral fissure, throat, eyes, and anus. Unprotected oral sex can allow those leaner to travel in either direction between i person'due south genitals and another person's throat.

But what nigh oral fissure-to-oral fissure kissing, like French kissing? Is that enough to allow these bacteria to hitch a ride from one mouth to another? Previous research, using a mathematical model, estimated that rima oris-to-oral fissure contact might be a significant — and underappreciated — mode of gonorrhea manual. Just that was a mathematical model, a sophisticated equation using what we know most a population's gonorrhea prevalence and sexual behavior to approximate how ofttimes the infection is transmitted from 1 mouth to some other.

Kissing and Gonorrhea

In May, Australian researchers published a study that put this mathematical model to a real-world test, making them the outset to investigate oral cavity-to-rima oris gonorrhea transmission in a population of actual humans. They surveyed 3,677 Australian gay and bisexual men about how many male partners they had in the previous three months. (Three months wasn't an arbitrary clamper of fourth dimension — it's the likely maximum duration of untreated oral gonorrhea.)

They asked respondents to give them numbers for "kissing-only" partners, "sex-only" partners, and "kissing-with-sex activity" partners. After unraveling all the combinations and pairing them with each bailiwick's oral-gonorrhea test results, they found that kissing was, indeed, associated with oral gonorrhea — while sexual practice without kissing was not.

The men surveyed were 46% more likely to have oral gonorrhea if they had four or more kissing-only partners in the past three months, and 81% more probable to have oral gonorrhea if they had at least four kissing-with-sex activity partners (compared to men who had aught or 1 partner in those categories). Men with sex-but partners, and who had non kissed anyone during those three months, were half equally likely to test positive for oral gonorrhea compared with other study participants.

Kissing Forbearance? Safe Kissing?

Gonorrhea is on the ascent, and the fact that gonorrhea is becoming well-nigh completely drug-resistant makes this epidemic peculiarly alarming. It's fourth dimension to focus on oral gonorrhea, which has generally been ignored equally unimportant. When it comes to gonorrhea prevention, near people recognize the importance of rubber use for vaginal or anal intercourse, but barriers are oftentimes dismissed for oral sexual activity — and kissing really hasn't been on anyone's radar until recently.

The starting time pace for whatsoever sexually active person is to know their STD status, and to know their partner'southward STD status. Testing for oral infections isn't standard when providing STD tests, so you lot can ask your health-care provider if an oral swab can be included in your screening. 2nd, barrier methods like condoms and dental dams can protect people during most types of sexual activity. Condoms are very effective in preventing the transmission of gonorrhea, whether they're used for oral, vaginal, or anal sex activity, or on shared sex toys. Dental dams can besides aid prevent gonorrhea transmission during oral sex and anal-oral sex (aka anilingus or "rimming").

Just across regular STD testing and bulwark methods, what else tin you practice to prevent gonorrhea? One report is investigating mouthwash as a preventative, and results should be available before long. An earlier study of men with oral gonorrhea found that 84% of them however tested positive for infection after gargling with saline for a full minute, while simply 52% were nevertheless positive afterwards gargling for a minute with an antiseptic mouthwash. Nevertheless, those results merely held true for the surface of the throat — the bacteria that cause gonorrhea were more likely to persist deeper into the pharynx. Whether that's practiced enough to prevent transmission via kissing is a question for time to come research to respond.

Ultimately, the hope is that a gonorrhea vaccine hits the market. If people could be immune to gonorrhea, a lot of problems would be solved — the almost significant of those existence the problem of antibiotic resistance. Simply two years ago, the World Health Organization used the word "impossible" when describing treatment of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, referring to documented cases of gonorrhea that were "untreatable by all known antibiotics." If these drug-resistant strains go more prevalent, nosotros could run into a return to the pre-antibiotic era of gonorrhea, when the disease was a major cause of infertility.

You lot tin selection up condoms or be tested for gonorrhea at whatsoever Planned Parenthood wellness center.

Tags: oral sexual activity, bisexual, gay, gonorrhea, condom, dental dams, kissing, STD, sexual health, STD Awareness, vaccines

Anna first volunteered for Planned Parenthood as a loftier school student in the 1990s. Since then, she has received a bachelor'southward degree from UC Berkeley and a master's degree in epidemiology from the Academy of Arizona. As an ode to her fascination with microbes, she writes the monthly STD Awareness serial, too as other pieces focusing on wellness and medicine.