Where did STI/STDs come from? Since they are created via giving to someone who has already contracted it
So where did they originate from?
In: Biology
They mutated and evolved the ability to be secreted via sexual organs and infect the recipient. They’re regular infectious diseases that developed an extra route to the host’s system.
For example HIV predecessor, SIV originated in chimpanzees, so it contracted and mutated to have human hosts either by humans being exposed to their blood (which is likely – for example, by eating them uncooked) or by some twisted form of zoophilia. I wish I was joking.
The short answer is that current literature is not entirely conclusive at this point. There also seems to be a large amount of variability between different diseases as far as geography, ethnic population, etc. when it comes to identifying a single point of origin. However, one interesting commonality in recent research is that it has been shown there is a common subject across most STI/STD historical studies and that would be your mom.
you can get many diseases through sex. Sometimes diseases evolve from “it’s possible to get it through sex” to “the main way to get it is through sex”.
I don’t think this is a great conversation for a five year old.
It varies. HIV is also spread by blood. That’s probably how it crossed species in the first place, crass jokes aside. Syphilis is believed to have come from South America, where it was a skin disease that thrive in the most environment. When it was transmitted to the old world by European explorers, it struggled in the drier parts of the world, so it adapted to moister body parts such as the genitalia. Herpes is spread by skin contact. In fact there are two varieties of HSV that are common today, one of which has is most common in the mouth, the other in the genitals. The latter just specialized to that region because humans commonly have skin to skin contact with their genitals.
Some of them come from animals.
* Zoonotic syphillis comes from primates
* Brucellosis comes from cattle, goats and sheeps
* Campylobactirosis comes from bird and livestock
* Genital herpes is believed to have originated in animals
Basically, the first contact was probably through farming, with humans living in close proximity of domesticated animals, and then it spread through human to human sexual contact.
obligatory, your mom.
seriously though most of the sexually transmitted virus existed in other species before they mutated to cross the interspecies barrier to affect other species ( in this case humans).
The sexual route of transmission – body to body via bodily fluid exchange is for the structurally most feeble microbes and viruses that can’t survive for any period of time in water (eg streams, wells), on surfaces, or in exhaled / sneezed/coughed out droplets.
They are so feeble they literally need to go directly from one person into another with no outside time at all.
While they may be structurally feeble they can surely be deadly if left untreated eg HIV, syphilis, HPV infection (via causing cancer).
Like most infectious diseases they mostly if not entirely come from other species originally and hopped the species barrier into humans. In the case of HIV it is believed to have come from the practice of preparation and consumption of ‘bush meat’ the meat of various primates and monkeys and crossed into humans most likely in the 1950’s in central Africa.
Noah and his family were each riddled with about a dozen STDs each. Otherwise the STDs would have died out in the flood.
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