Lockdown could be ‘game changer’ for STIs as people unable to have sex with new partners

‘If we could test and treat everybody for their infections now, that would be a game-changer going forward as people slowly move towards normality,’ says sexual health doctor

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Lockdown could be a “game-changer” for the nation’s sexual health, doctors have said.

Given that isolation means people cannot leave their homes to socialise with those outside of their households, this also means that people cannot have sex with new partners and pass on sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

“If we could test and treat everybody for their infections now, that would be a game-changer going forward as people slowly move towards normality,” says Dr John McSorley, a sexual health doctor and president of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV.

Speaking to BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat, Dr McSorely urged people to take at-home STI tests now to prevent people with infections from spreading them when the lockdown lifts.

More than half of UK sexual health services have closed due to the coronavirus outbreak, meaning at-home testing is more important now than ever before.

Justin Harbottle of sexual health testing organisation SH:24 said that if people can keep at-home testing going during lockdown, it’s a “once-in-a-lifetime event”.

Mr Harbottle added: “Even at the start of the HIV epidemic, I don’t think you had such a clean-cut period where collectively – as a population – people stopped having sex with new partners.”

The comments come after condom company Durex said sales were dwindling as a result of the pandemic.

Laxman Narasimhan, chief of executive of Reckitt Benckiser – a British household goods company that bought Durex in 2010 – said sales had dropped because social distancing is affecting “intimate occasions”.

People in the UK are having sex “significantly” less sex than before lockdown was introduced last month, said Narasimhan.

Meanwhile, in March the UK’s leading HIV and sexual health charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust, urged people “not to hook up” for sex during the coronavirus outbreak.

Dr Michael Brady, medical director at Terrence Higgins Trust, said: “I have never been an advocate of promoting abstinence – but this message is not about protecting your sexual health – it’s about protecting your general health and that of those around you from a virus that can be deadly.

“This is extraordinary and unprecedented advice for us to be giving out, but these are extraordinary and unprecedented times.”