Would You Take A Morning-After Pill That's Just For STIs?

Health officials in the US are eyeing up a morning-after pill just for sexually-transmitted infections – and it’s not even a new antibiotic.

At the moment, condoms are the only effective way to prevent STIs from being transmitted.

But now, doctors are looking into doxycycline, a cheap antibiotic that has been on the market for more than 50 years, to help prevent STIs across the States.

It comes after a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine looked into the effect of the antibiotic of 500 gay men, bisexual men and transgender women in Seattle and San Francisco.

All participants took one doxycycline pill within 72 hours of unprotected sex – and the results were certainly hopeful.

Researchers found people were 90% less likely to get chlamydia; 80% less likely to get syphilis; and more than 50 less likely to get gonorrhoea than those who didn’t take the antibiotic afterwards.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is already drafting recommendations for doxycycline to be used as a preventative measure.

Dr Philip Andrew Chan, who is consulting with the CDC on the doxycycline recommendations, admitted that using the drug will not be “a magic bullet but it will be another tool” to help combat the surge in STIs in the US.

It’s also not without its side-effects – the antibiotic can trigger stomach issues and rashes after sun exposure.

It’s also ineffective in heterosexual women, and there are fears that using too much doxycycline could help bacteria develop resistance to the drug.

The US is struggling with rising STI rates across the country, with millions infected each year.

As Dr John M Douglas Jr, a retired health official who lectures at the Colorado School of Public Health, told news agency AP: “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.”

Meanwhile, in the UK, government data shows there were 311,604 STIs diagnosed in England in 2021 a rise of 0.5% compared to the previous year, proving that this is a major health issue here, too.

There was a 1.7% leap in gonorrhoea infections, and a 8.4% jump in syphilis, although a 5% decrease in chlamydia.