April is Sexually Transmitted Disease Awareness Month. My posts this week are all about STDs and STIs, so allow me to geek-out for a moment about medical terminology.
Have you ever heard the term sexually transmitted infections (STIs, the term most currently used) interchanged with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and wondered, are they the same thing? Why, yes they are. The definition of disease is something that causes symptoms in the body.
From Merriam-Webster
Disease: a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms.
But not all STDs or STIs (whatever you want to call them) have symptoms or signs. Read yesterday’s post about the big three: chlamydia, gonorrhea, and human papilloma virus (HPV). Most women have few or no symptoms from these until something major hits, like cancer, or pelvic inflammatory disease, or infertility. So the public health world uses the term sexually transmitted infections (STIs) since the definition of infection refers to the process that happens at the cellular level when a pathogen invades a host.
From Merriam-Webster
Infection: the state produced by the establishment of an infective agent in or on a suitable host.
Diseases (symptoms and signs and complications) can result from infections. So, you can have a sexually transmitted infection without necessarily having a sexually transmitted disease.
Make sense? Leave me a note if you’re not sure what the hell I’m talking about.
sexlivesofmoms 