“We know it’s unlikely that people will stop kissing, and our team is already doing a clinical trial examining whether daily use of mouthwash could prevent gonorrhoea. This will help people understand how the infection was introduced – particularly if they have not have been sexually active,” he wrote in the email. “Through our research, we have shown that gonorrhea can be passed on through kissing. In any case, he said, research is vital to help practitioners and their patients completely understand the disease.Ĭhow, the lead author of the study, said he hopes the new findings will provide better understanding about gonorrhea. But because kissing is so common, it could also help destigmatize the disease and encourage people to talk about it. It would also be difficult to prevent transmission, he said.Īssuming the new findings from Australia are true, Lutz said, the idea could initially incite fear. Lutz, who has studied STIs among men who have sex with other men, said studies on mouth-to-mouth transmission of oral gonorrhea would be challenging because it is difficult to find people who have kissing-only partners – as well as oral gonorrhea – and who would be willing to discuss it. “We can’t let our defenses down – we must continue reinforcing efforts to rapidly detect and prevent resistance as long as possible.” “We expect gonorrhea will eventually wear down our last highly effective antibiotic, and additional treatment options are urgently needed,” Gail Bolan, director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, said last year. Some strains of gonorrhea have become resistant to most of the antibiotics that have been prescribed for them, according to the CDC. According to the CDC, gonorrhea diagnoses climbed 67% from 2013 to 2017 in the United States, reaching more than 555,000 cases. Gonorrhea has become a major concern as the number of reported cases of gonorrhea and some other sexually transmitted diseases have been rising across the country and public health authorities have expressed concern about an increasing resistance to treatment. He added: “We found after we controlled statistically for the number of men kissed, that ‘the number of men someone had sex with but did not kiss was not associated with throat gonorrhoea.’ ” This data challenges the accepted traditional transmission routes of gonorrhea held for the past 100 years, where a partner’s penis was thought to be the source of throat infection,” Eric Chow, the lead author of the study, wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
“We found that the more people an individual kissed also placed them at an increased risk of having throat gonorrhoea, irrespective of whether sex occurred with the kissing. The researchers found that those with a higher number of kissing-only and kissing-with-sex partners were at a greater risk of testing positive for oral gonorrhea, the study said. The men noted that they had had an average of four kissing-only partners, five kissing-with-sex partners and one sex-only partner over the past three months. Six percent tested positive for oral gonorrhea. The researchers studied questionnaires from more than 3,000 gay and bisexual men at a sexual health center in Melbourne about their recent sexual history. It can be transmitted among people who have vaginal, anal or oral sex with someone who has it, and it can infect the genitals, rectum and throat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.īut gonorrhea – even oral gonorrhea – is not considered to be a kissing disease rather, public health authorities say, oral gonorrhea is contracted through oral sex.
Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. “It’s a worthwhile topic to continue investigating” so medical practitioners can better screen and treat patients for the disease, he said.