Sexually Transmitted Diseases or STDs are diseases that
spread from one person to another via sexual contact. It spreads when a
person carrying the disease-causing organism engages in any kind of
sexual activity including, oral, vaginal, anal or genital with another
partner without using protection.
The best way to prevent
an STD is to practice safe sex at all times. Even so, the number of STD
cases is on a rise as many people do not recognise the disease quickly
and therefore continue to spread it further.
This article highlights some of the most common STDs one should watch out for.
Chlamydia
- Chlamydia is one of the most common STD’s. It is caused by a
bacterium called Chlamydia trachomatis which affects a man’s penile
urethra and a woman’s cervix. Many times people don’t realise they’ve
contracted the disease for months or even years. The most common
symptoms to diagnose chlamydia include burning while urinating, abnormal
genital discharge and pain during intercourse. A person can be best
protected from Chlamydia by practicing safe sex. Chlamydia is also
curable.
AIDS/HIV - AIDS/HIV is probably the most
commonly known and feared STD. It is caused by a virus called the human
immunodeficiency virus, which can be found in any bodily fluids
including semen, blood, or breast milk. Most people who’ve contracted
the disease show symptoms like flu, fatigue, swollen lymph glands, skin
rash, nausea within two months. Although there is no complete cure for
AIDS, if diagnosed early, it can be prevented from progressing with a
combination of highly active anti-retroviral drugs.
Herpes - Herpes
is a silent disease and one may not even know about it if your partner
has it. It is contagious and can spread via skin to skin touch. For
example, mouth to genital or genital to genital. There are times where
people don’t show visible sores but the most common indication of herpes
are sores that arise on the penis, vagina, anus or mouth. Even though
there is no permanent cure to herpes, there are medical treatments to
treat it. Once infected, this virus never goes away and keeps
reoccurring two to four times a year.
Crabs -
Crabs or pubic lice are mites that lodge themselves in your genitals,
hands, fingers or chest hair. They appear as eggs or lice attached to
the hair and can spread if left untreated. They cause a person to itch
the affected area. Crabs are passed via sexual contact but they can also
be contracted from infected bed linen, clothing or toilet seats.
Syphilis -
Syphilis is a serious STD, which may not always show symptoms and can
be very dangerous. It is caused by a bacterial infection called
Treponema Pallidum and is transmitted via direct contact when there is
no condom involved. Although symptoms are rare, sores around the rectum,
vagina, mouth or genital area indicate the presence of the syphilis
virus. There can be one or more sores that appear like big bug bites
that are painless. They could also be accompanied by hair loss, sore
throat or patchy white skin rash. The easiest way to diagnose it is by
testing your blood. The good part is that it can be treated by
penicillin or tetracycline. But if left untreated it can cause severe
problems like blindness, brain or heart damage or death.
Genital Warts -
Genital warts are the most commonly contracted STD. They are caused by a
virus called Human Papilloma, which pops up in form of warts around the
genital area, hence the name genital warts. Once a person is infected,
it may take about three months for the warts to appear. These warts are
highly contagious and can cause other symptoms like muscle aches, pain
while urinating or swollen glands near the genitals. Even if a person
doesn’t see any warts but experiences the following symptoms, he/she
should visit a doctor immediately before it gets serious. Unfortunately,
this virus cannot be permanently treated although the warts caused by
it can be removed every time they appear.
READ MORE: http://news.naij.com/54486.html
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
Seeing Skin in a Syrian Refugee Camp
All day long in Mafraq, an impoverished corner of Jordan that has
been swarmed by Syrian refugees, women kept pulling me aside and
unzipping their abayas. They spotted me amid the male aid workers,
grabbed my hand and pulled me to a corner to reveal the scars on their
necks, their stomachs, their hips.
I'd crossed the Jordanian border from Israel earlier that morning, on assignment to report about Israeli aid to Syrian refugees. I was ready to see hunger and homelessness. I hadn't expected, however, to be shown so much skin.
One Syrian woman named Asma revealed a gash along her belly that I thought was a scar from a caesarian section. "Baby?" I asked her, hooking my arms into an imaginary cradle to compensate for my lack of Arabic.
"No, not baby," she said. Then her fingers waved desperately and she lifted her arms above her head. "Boom!" she said. She pulled out a cheap cell phone and showed me a grainy video of her dying husband writhing on a Syrian street. She couldn't have been more clear.
At a tiny desert refugee camp of Syrians who had fled the crowding and disease of the larger tent cities of Zaatari and Mreijeb Al Fhoud, a teenaged girl named Firdous dragged me to semi-privacy behind a van and carefully unwrapped her hijab. On her breastbone, she showed me a smattering of thick purple bruises. They looked like berries, the kind that bleed into pancakes and turn the batter blue, but they were burst blood vessels. I told her in English that I would help her find a doctor, knowing that she couldn't understand me, which gave me an excuse to lie.
Our translator had been detained on the Israeli side of the border, held back from crossing with us thanks to an unpaid cell phone bill, which in these parts is enough to put a freeze on your passport. The Israeli aid workers who had brought me were pressed for time and walking a tenuous line in their coordination with Jordanian groups on the ground. I was an untrained witness to a chaotic dump of dried lentils and laundry detergent, with no medical skills and only a smattering of Arabic vocabulary. All I could do for these women was be a witness to their wounds.
Hours later, when I was back across the border in my clean, light-filled Tel Aviv apartment, eating takeout Chinese on the sofa and watching "Homeland" with my husband, I began to think about those women's bodies. My assignment that day had been to write about the food parcels the refugees were receiving from Israel, and I had gathered enough information to do so. But the nakedness had been so unbridled, and worst of all, it had been so very easy to leave behind.
It's simple in Israel to get into a car, cross a border, and in a matter of minutes find yourself in an alternate universe. For Americans at home, such culture shock usually takes a jet plane. Here, where the conflicts are compact and the borders more pockmarked, the world's headlines are always just a short drive away.
And I had a ride right to them. I was picked up in Israel at 6 a.m. by a carload of aid workers, and by 9 a.m. we were at the Beit Shean border crossing, our passports being scrutinized by a surly Jordanian customs officer. It wasn't even lunchtime yet when Asma unzipped her robe and pulled up the shirt beneath to show me her belly. By dinnertime, Firdous and her family were probably still huddled in their tent in an unmapped swath of Jordanian desert, gnashing out that afternoon's sandstorm while I was back home in Tel Aviv slurping wonton soup.
This fall, while U.S. President Barack Obama wavered over whether or not to exact revenge on Syrian President Bashar Assad for dropping chemical weapons on his own people, Tel Aviv braced itself. We are close enough, we know, to be the first line of attack. We are a western enclave in a region turning more and more eastern; the sacrificial lamb in a den of spring-stoked wolves. I love Tel Aviv because it is like a nation unto itself; a city of beaches and bohemians and non-kosher bistros that is my sanctuary from the Israeli headaches that beckon the moment you reach its outskirts.
So it made sense that I would touch the broken nerves of the Syrian conflict in neighboring Jordan and make it home to my Tel Aviv oasis in a handful of hours. That is the irony of life here; to live in Tel Aviv, one must stoke a willful ignorance of the ugliness of the Middle East. But our sanctuary is imaginary. After I had showered away the day's grime and joined my husband on the sofa that night, I spied the unopened cardboard boxes containing our gas masks stacked in the corner.
We will never have to open them, he assured me last month when he brought them home after hours in line at the distribution center. And we can always run to the shelter.
Better safe than sorry, I said in return, because there is strange comfort in adages.
Coming home from Jordan, however, those silent cardboard boxes seemed to mock me. Tel Aviv remains secure, our gas masks mere props in someone else's war. And I am left with the unsettling realization that I went to that refugee camp to take home a story, but brought nothing to give.
Maybe it was because of the shame that I lay in bed that night, straining my ears for the air raid siren. It's easy to say I was simply on edge after a long day, but I think a small part of me was hoping to hear it. Its wail would rise up in the night, shattering the silence like a gash across skin.
But the night remained still, and I, wishing for absolution, curled into my clean sheets and waited for sleep.
I'd crossed the Jordanian border from Israel earlier that morning, on assignment to report about Israeli aid to Syrian refugees. I was ready to see hunger and homelessness. I hadn't expected, however, to be shown so much skin.
One Syrian woman named Asma revealed a gash along her belly that I thought was a scar from a caesarian section. "Baby?" I asked her, hooking my arms into an imaginary cradle to compensate for my lack of Arabic.
"No, not baby," she said. Then her fingers waved desperately and she lifted her arms above her head. "Boom!" she said. She pulled out a cheap cell phone and showed me a grainy video of her dying husband writhing on a Syrian street. She couldn't have been more clear.
At a tiny desert refugee camp of Syrians who had fled the crowding and disease of the larger tent cities of Zaatari and Mreijeb Al Fhoud, a teenaged girl named Firdous dragged me to semi-privacy behind a van and carefully unwrapped her hijab. On her breastbone, she showed me a smattering of thick purple bruises. They looked like berries, the kind that bleed into pancakes and turn the batter blue, but they were burst blood vessels. I told her in English that I would help her find a doctor, knowing that she couldn't understand me, which gave me an excuse to lie.
Our translator had been detained on the Israeli side of the border, held back from crossing with us thanks to an unpaid cell phone bill, which in these parts is enough to put a freeze on your passport. The Israeli aid workers who had brought me were pressed for time and walking a tenuous line in their coordination with Jordanian groups on the ground. I was an untrained witness to a chaotic dump of dried lentils and laundry detergent, with no medical skills and only a smattering of Arabic vocabulary. All I could do for these women was be a witness to their wounds.
Hours later, when I was back across the border in my clean, light-filled Tel Aviv apartment, eating takeout Chinese on the sofa and watching "Homeland" with my husband, I began to think about those women's bodies. My assignment that day had been to write about the food parcels the refugees were receiving from Israel, and I had gathered enough information to do so. But the nakedness had been so unbridled, and worst of all, it had been so very easy to leave behind.
It's simple in Israel to get into a car, cross a border, and in a matter of minutes find yourself in an alternate universe. For Americans at home, such culture shock usually takes a jet plane. Here, where the conflicts are compact and the borders more pockmarked, the world's headlines are always just a short drive away.
And I had a ride right to them. I was picked up in Israel at 6 a.m. by a carload of aid workers, and by 9 a.m. we were at the Beit Shean border crossing, our passports being scrutinized by a surly Jordanian customs officer. It wasn't even lunchtime yet when Asma unzipped her robe and pulled up the shirt beneath to show me her belly. By dinnertime, Firdous and her family were probably still huddled in their tent in an unmapped swath of Jordanian desert, gnashing out that afternoon's sandstorm while I was back home in Tel Aviv slurping wonton soup.
This fall, while U.S. President Barack Obama wavered over whether or not to exact revenge on Syrian President Bashar Assad for dropping chemical weapons on his own people, Tel Aviv braced itself. We are close enough, we know, to be the first line of attack. We are a western enclave in a region turning more and more eastern; the sacrificial lamb in a den of spring-stoked wolves. I love Tel Aviv because it is like a nation unto itself; a city of beaches and bohemians and non-kosher bistros that is my sanctuary from the Israeli headaches that beckon the moment you reach its outskirts.
So it made sense that I would touch the broken nerves of the Syrian conflict in neighboring Jordan and make it home to my Tel Aviv oasis in a handful of hours. That is the irony of life here; to live in Tel Aviv, one must stoke a willful ignorance of the ugliness of the Middle East. But our sanctuary is imaginary. After I had showered away the day's grime and joined my husband on the sofa that night, I spied the unopened cardboard boxes containing our gas masks stacked in the corner.
We will never have to open them, he assured me last month when he brought them home after hours in line at the distribution center. And we can always run to the shelter.
Better safe than sorry, I said in return, because there is strange comfort in adages.
Coming home from Jordan, however, those silent cardboard boxes seemed to mock me. Tel Aviv remains secure, our gas masks mere props in someone else's war. And I am left with the unsettling realization that I went to that refugee camp to take home a story, but brought nothing to give.
Maybe it was because of the shame that I lay in bed that night, straining my ears for the air raid siren. It's easy to say I was simply on edge after a long day, but I think a small part of me was hoping to hear it. Its wail would rise up in the night, shattering the silence like a gash across skin.
But the night remained still, and I, wishing for absolution, curled into my clean sheets and waited for sleep.
NOT KIDDING: Sen. Yerima Divorces 17-Yr-Old To Marry 15-Yr-Old
Three years after marrying a 14 year old Egyptian girl named
Marian, former Zamfara state governor and serving senator of the federal
republic of Nigeria, Sen. Ahmed Yerima, has divorced her to marry a
younger girl, reports provide.
According to the information available, Sen. Yerima and four men, said to be members of the Zamfara State House of Assembly were in Egypt a few weeks ago for the wedding fathia of a new bride. It has been learnt that the girl is 15 years old.
Mr. Yerima has one child from Marian, who is 17 now. The reason he divorced her is to enable him take a new wife as he's not allowed more than 4 wives.
The Senator is alleged to have married and divorced a few women in the last few years but has never changed his first three wives, only the fourth ones.
It would be recalled tha Sen. Ahmed Yerima this year was strongly against the deletion of the section of the 1999 constitution which pegged the official marriage age in Nigeria as 18 year, saying it was anti-Islam.
READ MORE: http://news.naij.com/54420.html?new_letter
According to the information available, Sen. Yerima and four men, said to be members of the Zamfara State House of Assembly were in Egypt a few weeks ago for the wedding fathia of a new bride. It has been learnt that the girl is 15 years old.
Mr. Yerima has one child from Marian, who is 17 now. The reason he divorced her is to enable him take a new wife as he's not allowed more than 4 wives.
The Senator is alleged to have married and divorced a few women in the last few years but has never changed his first three wives, only the fourth ones.
It would be recalled tha Sen. Ahmed Yerima this year was strongly against the deletion of the section of the 1999 constitution which pegged the official marriage age in Nigeria as 18 year, saying it was anti-Islam.
READ MORE: http://news.naij.com/54420.html?new_letter
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