(Keep reading: These are the least common sexually transmitted diseases in Colombia)
Countries with good STI surveillance, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, are reporting an increase in STIs. In addition, the WHO points out that several countries report “increasingly” failures in current gonorrhea treatment recommendations.
Early testing and diagnosis are critical to stopping the spread of STIs. When left untreated, some STIs can have long-term, irreversible consequences.
More than a million new sexually transmitted infections are contracted every day, posing a “major global health challenge.” However, the agency regrets that monitoring and understanding of trends in new STIs in low- and middle-income countries “are hampered by limited access to diagnostic tests.”
“Early testing and diagnosis are critical to stopping the spread of STIs. When left untreated, some STIs can have irreversible long-term consequences and some can be life-threatening,” said the head of Sexually Transmitted Infections at the WHO Global HIV, Hepatitis and STI Programs, Teodora Wi.
(You may be interested: A bad sex life can affect your brain, according to a new study)
The agency has published new guidance including target product profiles for point-of-care diagnostic technologies for syphilis (‘Treponema pallidum’), ‘Chlamydia trachomatis’, ‘Neisseria gonorrhoeae’ and ‘Trichomonas vaginalis’, in order to to facilitate the development of quality diagnostic tests for STIs.
In this sense, the WHO recalls that recent scientific advances in the treatment and technologies of STIs, as well as innovative methods of service delivery, offer “an important opportunity to end STIs as a public health problem from now to 2030”.
However, they also acknowledge that the large variations in investment, maturity, and performance of STI surveillance systems between countries “remains a challenge.”
