US officials have encouraged the use of a morning-after style pill to stop the rise in sexually-transmitted diseases in America.
Experts have warned that infections such as chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis have been rising due to lack of sex education, declining contraception use and lack of testing during the pandemic in the US.
According to the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), rates of gonorrhoea have increased by 118 per cent from a low in 2009.
Further data showed that the rate of chlamydia increased by 3.9 per cent from 2021 to 2022.
In order to combat the rise in STDs, US health officials have called for the public to use a drug called doxycycline as a morning-after style pill to stop infections.
The drug has been sold for more than 50 years to treat dental infections and skin conditions.
“Sexually transmitted infections are an enormous, low-priority public health problem.
“And they’ve been a low-priority problem for decades, in spite of the fact that they are the most commonly reported kind of infectious disease,” said Dr John M. Douglas Jr, a retired health official who lectures at the Colorado School of Public Health.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found the drug had a dramatic effect on the STD infections within 72 hours of unprotected sex.
The study involved 500 gay and bisexual women and transgender women in Seattle and San Francisco with STD infections.
Those who took the pills were about 90 per cent less likely to get chlamydia, about 80 per cent less likely to get syphilis, and more than 50 per cent less likely to get gonorrhoea compared with people who did not take the pills after sex, the researchers found.
“We do need new approaches, new innovations,” to help bring sexually transmitted infections under control, said Dr Philip Andrew Chan, who is consulting with the CDC on the doxycycline recommendations.
