No Antibiotics, No Sexual Revolution

Dec 13, 2013
Education
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Last night, I had a drink with Peter Huber, who has a terrific new book out on how the legal system is holding back medical innovation. We chatted about a lot of things, but one thing we discussed was how antibiotics have been the unseen driver of so many developments in the modern world.

Most of them are medical, like transplant surgery, and I’ve written about those before. But here’s one you might not have thought of: the sexual revolution. Most of us, if we think about it at all, probably attribute the rise in premarital sex to The Pill, among other factors. But before the birth control pill, there was another invention that was just as necessary: antibiotics.

The sexually transmitted diseases of yesteryear were pretty nasty. If you’re interested, you can Google up images of tertiary syphilis, but I don’t recommend it unless you’ve got a strong stomach. The initial symptoms of various common STDs were also unpleasant, and in women, could severely impair your fertility. You could use condoms, of course, but then, you could also use condoms to prevent pregnancy.

Then suddenly STDs weren’t so risky. You might have to make an embarrassing visit to the doctor and get a shot, but that’s nothing compared with horrible treatments using arsenic or mercury that were mostly ineffective. It’s no coincidence that the sexual revolution seemed to come to an abrupt halt when AIDS entered the scene. And as I understand it, AIDS is relatively hard to get compared with other STDs.

Without antibiotics, any chance sexual encounter could lead to a permanent disease that, among other things, would probably make it hard to find a long-term relationship partner. In that world, we’d probably have a lot fewer chance sexual encounters.

So thank antibiotics for your open heart surgery — but while you’re at it, thank them for your sexual freedom, too.

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Lurkingreader
Lurkingreader
10 years ago

This gratitude is wonderful if it didn’t contradict the stance presented in the related post, unless of course antibiotics for bacterials were the only driver, excluding antivirals the medical and scientific communities helped us out with.

“http://therealpornwikileaks.com/new-study-ahf-wrong-hiv-protective-drugs-increase-sexual-risk-taking/”

ernestgreene
ernestgreene
10 years ago

There is no scientific correlation between the consequences of generations of wide-spread use of antibiotics in the general population which creates treatment-resistant bacteria and the dubious claim that ARVs make HIV undetectable to testing. Yet another stupid argument from the usual source of stupid.

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