Syphilis is caused by a bacterium. It is transferred through or oral sex by skin contact or sexual fluids. If you have syphilis sores then you are in great risk of getting the disease. If you see the sores, then you shouldn’t have sex. Also, pregnant women carrying the bacterium can contaminate their babies. You cannot get the bacterium through towels or toilet seats. Living in You The bacterium lives all over your body, usually in the genital area, making sores and itchy spots that you can often mistake for something else. There are a lot of bad consequences if you don’t treat it, but that is something that we’re going to look at later.
Symptoms People who have the disease may have symptoms, but may not be able to identify them because the sores may be too small or may be invisible to the human eye to see. The symptoms of syphilis occur in various steps. What happens first is that you get the sores that don’t hurt, so you will probably not notice them. These sores will appear in the genital area, where you probably received the bacterium.
The sores usually heal by themselves. The second part comes in worse. You get rashes on the bottom of your feet and on the bottom of your hands. This is when syphilis starts to become contagious. Other symptoms that are caused by the bacterium are fever, sore throats, headaches, weight loss, muscle aches, swollen lymph glands, tiredness, and hair loss. Incubation Period The time of how long the bacterium starts to react on the body depends on the person.
In most cases, you get the symptoms in the first three weeks after the bacterium has entered your system. Symptoms can appear even from two days to five months and, in rare cases, even years after. An abundant amount of people don’t notice the symptoms at all, and it might seem like a symptom form another sexually transmitted disease, so it is hard to determine exactly when one has received the bacterium.
Tested? Not Tested? How Long? Like any other disease, as soon as you have symptoms of illness, you should go see your doctor immediately. You should not wait for any cases like these, especially not when it comes to syphilis. The sooner you are diagnosed with the disease, the sooner you’ll start the treatment. When the doctor discovers that you have syphilis he or she will make you go under the treatment as soon as possible before the bacterium starts getting naughtier on the symptoms.
Methods of Prevention The best and the only way to prevent from getting syphilis and any other sexually transmitted disease is just by not having sexual intercourse. Sexual intercourse turns out to be one of the riskiest actions because a teenager can get pregnant, a person can get an STD or STI, and many other things. If you do have sexual intercourse then you should use a condom AT ALL TIMES unless you only have one sex partner that has been tested and is clear from all STD’s. You should make sure that your partner has sex with you and only you. Even if you both have been tested you should make at least one yearly check up because there are diseases that you can catch from public places such as toilet seats, etc.
Condoms=100% Protection? As always, condoms will never provide a 100% protection because it can break at any point of action. Also, even with the condom on, there are still parts of the male genital area that have skin contact with the female’s genital area so with or without a condom you’ll always have a risk of getting this STD. Sores may be actual at the places where the condom is not covering the skin. However, it’s not because they do not provide a 100% protection that you should not be using them!
Treatment There indeed is a treatment for syphilis. Since the disease is a bacterium a carrier can take antibiotics to kill the little beast. A person that starts taking the antibiotics sooner will have better results and outcomes than a person who starts taking them later. Also, there will be less long term effects in place. The antibiotics will kill the bacterium but they will not cure the damages that have already been done which is why you shouldn’t wait for a long time!
Going Long Term The longer you wait, the deadlier it is. By waiting so long before getting treated, you can get fatal consequences. Babies that are born from women that have syphilis and that have never been treated before can get congenital syphilis. There are lots of symptoms that can make the newborn suffer which is something that no human would want to do. The baby can also die with congenital syphilis. They usually die because an abundant amount of blood has been lost. If you analyze this closely, you can see that syphilis has the worst long term effects out of all the sexually transmitted diseases. This is why you should not wait at all, and get treated as soon as you start to get symptoms of any kind of disease because the consequences can be fatal.