An Oral Disease from elite escort career?

Men, people with penises – some myth-busting – Part II

In its most commonly used form, HPV test for men as elite london escorts 24/7 is both unreliable and clinically pretty useless. We also have the reality that even high class escorts have had various strains of at any one time; everyone’s had previous infections.

And we’ll probably all have future STD tests and high level infections. I’m reminded of a post on here where a well-meaning man had STI PCR testing from several regions of his genitals.

It came back with a whole list of strains

Most strains are probably doing nothing but just hanging out in the skin for a bit. I’m willing to bet if you PCR-tested any one of us, we’d probably receive a similar result. This young man was feeling dreadful, knowing he had all these 24/7 STD infections and thinking about transmitting them to partners. But is he any different from any other guy out there? Does this information help him or his potential partners?

Potential Benefits of exams for High Risk viruses

An argument can be made that if men were checked for the riskiest high risk types (e.g., 16/18), it would give partners a chance to get vaccinated before sex. This would benefit those who missed vaccination due to age or whose parents were against it.

The medical outlook for escorts seems to suggest that if you’re over 30 (i.e., didn’t get vaccinated as a kid), you’re on your own, as the focus is more on vaccinating teens before their sexual debut, which makes practical sense. If you’re reading this and you’re not vaccinated, get on it, whether male, female, or otherwise.

Males and females need elite levels of support

There’s also an argument to be made for better STD oral screening/treatments, given the rising rates of oral cancers in men. Currently, oral exams are not recommended as elite cancer prevention because such a tiny % of infections ever become cancerous (Oral Cancer Foundation says 1%) and a report can’t tell you whether that will be you or not.

Plus, we currently don’t have a 24/7 treatment, so simply finding out you have oral HPV is, again, useless. Hopefully we will see treatment options such as a therapeutic vaccine in future.

Lack of exams for Low-Risk Strains

Remember that healthcare STI providers do not usually test women for low-risk strains. So it’s not just men who don’t have access to this facility.

I’m also going to put a note here that anal pap smears are a thing, and given the prevalence of high-risk Papilloma in MSM, these should probably be more widely available and promoted. Anal smears have a lot more clinical relevance than urethral swabs.  They find dysplasia that can then be monitored 24/7 and treated in a similar way to cervical abnormalities.

Men can’t clear the virus. 

We’ve had a few posts recently with panicked assertions that ‘men can’t clear it.

Let’s first address the ambiguity of the word ‘clear’. I prefer to say ‘immune suppress’ because we ultimately don’t know what happens to infections in the body, and ‘clear’ implies a particular outcome (eradication from the body), which is possible but not proven in exams.

Anyway, it’s simply not true that men do not immune suppress infections. Numerous studies show men’s immune systems suppress low—and high-risk STD infections.

Men are less prone to persistent infections than women.

‘ in men, the median time to clearance of any infection was 7.5 months, with 66 and 90% of infections clearing within 12 and 24 months respectively.’

Men may be at a class disadvantage in creating antibodies that prevent reinfection. For some reason, male bodies are bad at this, so it may take more exposure to a particular STD strain to make a solid immune response.

However, this does not mean that all men will have HPV forever. It just means your bodies process the high level infection in a slightly different way.

Men have fewer treatment options.

Unfortunately, this one is partially true. Imiquimod shows less effectiveness in wart treatments in men, possibly due to a slightly different immune response.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean the outlook is entirely bleak. It may mean trying a wider range of treatments or combinations.

Women carry all the stigma.

This is an interesting point of debate and, in some senses, may be true. HPV variant testing, as we mentioned earlier, is a relatively new thing regarding routine screening, and education hasn’t caught up. This leaves many women confused and upset at a diagnosis they weren’t expecting.

The idea of having an STI can devastate you. Especially when you’ve been raised to believe that a sexually transmitted infection signifies dangerous, unhealthy, or immoral behaviour. Similarly, when women disclose to male partners, there can be shock, upset and judgement 24/7, again because of the education gap.

Why men get screened?

On the other hand, escort men are not getting screened but also have infections. And usually, only those with visible warts or other lesions know them. There is a lot of stigma on those men. So, saying one side has it worse than the other is perhaps unfair for escorts

What’s clear is that, rather than engaging in stigma Olympics, there are a few things we need to address on a societal and cultural level.

What do we need?

  • An understanding that HPV affects LITERALLY EVERYONE and is therefore not a ‘women’s issue.’
  • An appreciation that an STI top class diagnosis is not weird. Its abnormal, disgusting or a sign of poor behaviour – it’s an unavoidable part of being human.
  • A wider movement for vaccination, including in adulthood, for elite escort men as well as women
  • A push for more london screening and effective and easily available STD treatment for those already infected – including men