Phone app Tinder and the hook-up culture it fosters could be behind rising rates of gonorrhea and syphilis, a Bendigo health service has said.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
A Kirby Institute report card on the sexual health of Australians this week revealed gonorrhea diagnoses in regional areas were up 30 per cent since 2012.
Syphillis was three-times as prevalent in regional areas now than five years ago.
Bendigo Community Health Services sexual health nurse Mary-Anne McCluskey said her organisation was seeing more cases of the sexually transmitted infections.
Already in 2017, the Loddon Mallee region recorded 129 gonorrhea cases and 47 syphilis diagnoses, up from 89 and 19 respectively last year.
Read more: Cases of STI superbug on the rise
Ms McCluskey believed sexual health patients were having more sex with more partners than ever before, something made possible because of the advent of hook-up apps Tinder and Grindr.
“It's quite normal for someone to come in for testing, and when you say 'have you got a current partner?’, they say they have several casual, current partners,” she said.
A decrease in condom use could also be responsible for the STI hike, Ms McCluskey said, proffering that “grim reaper ad” fear of STIs and blood-borne viruses might be waning.
But the higher detection rates were also reflected the fact more people were seeking sexual health check-ups. Her service was seeing increased numbers of gay men – BCHS is the host site for a trial of HIV prevention drug PrEP – and people from towns outside of Bendigo, including Wedderburn and Maryborough.
“People are coming in from smaller regional areas, people saying, ‘I want to get tested, but I can't go to my GP because he's in the football club’, or something like that,” she said.
“If they didn’t know they could come here, they wouldn’t go anywhere, maybe just ignore it for a bit longer.”
The community health service this year released a video designed to demystify the sexual health check-up process among young people, a tool Ms McCluskey said was successful in attracting people to BCHS.
The Kirby report also found a dramatic rise in chlamydia and gonorrhea cases among the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, where the infections three and seven times more common than in non-Indigenous people.
Mark Kearney
Journalist. Traveller. Pop culture connoisseur. Mark is passionate about education, the arts and social justice, especially stories affecting the LGBTI community.
Journalist. Traveller. Pop culture connoisseur. Mark is passionate about education, the arts and social justice, especially stories affecting the LGBTI community.
