• Question: How did STD's come into existence???

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 19 Jun 2014:


      I don’t know how they stared originally. How did any life from start originally?
      The pathogens that cause STDs are not much different from the pathogens that cause non-sexually transmitted diseases. Most pathogenic organisms are parasites. A parasite has a way of life that means it lives off another organism (called the host). A parasite needs to find a way to get from host to host or when the first host died it would be homeless. Pathogens have developed lots of different ways of spreading from host to host. Things like the cold virus can make you cough to spread itself through the air. STDs like syphilis or HIV take advantage of the fact that humans sometimes like to share body fluids and hitch a ride.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 25 Jun 2014:


      We can think of the human body of having lots of different ‘habitats’ for microbes – the nose, the mouth, the gut, the skin and so on – and the set of microbes that lives in each habitat are specialised to live there in some way. STDs are caused by a range of organisms, all evolved to be particularly suited to that particular environment (such as the mucosal membranes) and method of spread. However, they’re not really all that different from their skin or gut (or even environmental) counterparts – they just gained a few mutations that meant they could thrive in that location. Indeed, some diseases known as STDs can be spread in many other ways too – for example, herpes also causes cold sores.

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