CNN – A common but potentially dangerous vaginal infection that affects nearly 1 in 3 women globally should be considered a sexually transmitted disease, a new study says.
Bacterial vaginosis, or BV, is currently viewed as a woman’s issue, thus leaving the sexual partner untreated.
“I started getting them quite recurrently. I’d go to doctors and get treated with antibiotics, and it would almost always come back,” said Hanae, a woman who participated in the clinical trial on BV conducted in Melbourne, Australia.
“It’s like not really worth it for me to even go to doctors,” said Hanae, whose last name was withheld by the study authors to protect her privacy.
For half of all women with bacterial vaginosis, the infection returns after completion of a week of antibiotics, the preferred medical treatment for BV, said first author Lenka Vodstrcil, a senior research fellow at the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre at Monash University in Australia.
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“Symptoms of BV can include itching, pain while urinating, an odd odor and a thin, white vaginal discharge. For some women, however, BV is a silent predator, attacking without such telltale symptoms.”
“The bacteria that cause BV can be located in men, especially in penile skin and also in the urethra,” Vodstrcil said in a news release.
“This suggests that BV is probably sexually transmitted, and that is why so many women get it back again after treatment.”
When BV was treated as a sexually transmitted disease, with both partners receiving oral antibiotics and men using topical creams, the recurrence rate dropped by over half, according to the study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“Our trial has shown that reinfection from partners is causing a lot of the BV recurrence women experience, and provides evidence that BV is in fact a STI (sexually transmitted infection),” said senior author Catriona Bradshaw …
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