Where Can I Get More Information
Health care providers with STD consultation requests can contact the STD Clinical Consultation Network . This service is provided by the National Network of STD Clinical Prevention Training Centers and operates five days a week. STDCCN is convenient, simple, and free to health care providers and clinicians. More information is available at www.stdccn.orgexternal icon.
Division of STD Prevention Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-38271-800-783-987
References
1. OFarrell N, Morison L, Moodley P, et al. Genital ulcers and concomitant complaints in men attending a sexually transmitted infections clinic: implications for sexually transmitted infections management. Sexually transmitted diseases 2008 35:545-9.
2. White JA. Manifestations and management of lymphogranuloma venereum. Current opinion in infectious diseases 2009 22:57-66.
3. Kreisel KM, Spicknall IH, Gargano JW, Lewis FM, Lewis RM, Markowitz LE, Roberts H, Satcher Johnson A, Song R, St. Cyr SB, Weston EJ, Torrone EA, Weinstock HS. Sexually transmitted infections among US women and men: Prevalence and incidence estimates, 2018. Sex Transm Dis 2021 in press.
4. CDC. Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance, 2019. Atlanta, GA: Department of Health and Human Services April 2021.
5. Torrone E, Papp J, Weinstock H. Prevalence of Chlamydia trachomatis Genital Infection Among Persons Aged 1439 Years United States, 20072012. MMWR 2014 63:834-8.
Whats The Treatment For Chlamydia
Chlamydia is usually easy to get rid of. Your nurse or doctor will get you antibiotics to treat the infection. Sometimes you only have to take one dose of medication. Another chlamydia treatment lasts for 7 days. Your doctor will help you figure out which treatment is best for you.
If youre treated for chlamydia, its really important for your sexual partners to get treated also. Otherwise, you can keep passing the infection back and forth, or to other people. Sometimes your doctor will give you medicine for both you and your partner.
Chlamydia Symptoms May Not Be Apparent
Chlamydia is often asymptomatic until it has progressed to later stages, or symptoms are so mild that the infected person doesnt pay much attention to them and therefore doesnt seek treatment.
When they occur, symptoms of chlamydia may include:
- Pain or burning while urinating
- Pain during sexual activity
- Pain, discharge, or bleeding from the anus
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Taking The Incorrect Medication
Keep in mind that your treatment can fail if youâre taking the wrong medication. You might be prescribed the wrong drugs due to syndromatic treatment, an efficient, but sometimes inaccurate treatment method in which patients are prescribed STD treatment based on symptoms, rather than testing. This is sometimes done in STD clinics when there is a concern that the patient might not come back for their test results.
And you could be taking the wrong medication if youâve acquired it on your own and chose the wrong onessuch as taking medication that was prescribed for a past STD you had, or for your partner, or for a friend.
Not all STDs are caused by the same pathogens . Different illnesses require different treatments.
Thatâs why itâs so important for your healthcare provider to correctly identify whatâs causing your infection. Thatâs also why you canât just take any random antibiotic and hope itâs going to work.
How Do You Know If Chlamydia Is Gone After Treatment
If youve had treatment after testing and taking the right antibiotics, its always important to confirm chlamydia cure. You can wait till five weeks after medications and recheck for chlamydia to verify cure.
If you still test positive after five weeks, please let your health professional know right away
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How Long Does It Take For Chlamydia To Go Away With Antibiotics
If your test results are positive for chlamydia, your doctor will prescribe antibiotics. Chlamydia typically goes away within 1 to 2 weeks. You should avoid sex during this time to prevent transmitting the disease. Your doctor may prescribe a one-dose medication or a medication youll take daily for about a week.
Genotyping & Quantification Of Organism Load
Chlamydial fingerprinting will be conducted on specimens that are PCR positive at baseline and at test of cure. We will determine the organism load, identify the chlamydia serovar of each infection through a series of quantitative PCR assays to establish whether or not the genotype of the chlamydia detected in those women who have a repeat positive is the same as the type present at baseline . Initial qPCR primers and probes have been designed to predict antigenic differences in major outer membrane protein to determine the serovar as previously described . The primary chlamydia group-specific multiplex quantitative PCR will target conserved regions of the ompA gene specific to all chlamydia serovar groups, including the B group , C group or intermediate group serovars. This assay will enable quantification of organism load and will be used to direct serovar-specific PCRs to determine serovars present in the specimen, including possibility of mixed serovars .
Specimens from participants where the same serovar has been detected at baseline and follow up will undergo further discriminatory confirmation of relatedness using sequencing of ompA gene, as well as five house-keeping genes utilizing a multilocus sequence typing approach . This will include the amplification and sequencing followed by determining MLST type using C. trachomatis MLST database .
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Can A Treated Std Come Back
Monique Rainford, MD, is board-certified in obstetrics-gynecology, and currently serves as an Assistant Clinical Professor at Yale Medicine. She is the former chief of obstetrics-gynecology at Yale Health.
You may be familiar with some of the more common sexually transmitted diseases . Chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and trichomoniasis can all be treated, and often cured, with antibiotics.
It’s important that you find treatment for your STD if you think or know you have one. It’s also important to know that having your STD treated is not a guarantee that it will never come back.
This article explains why an STD can return, why taking the wrong medication can hurt you, and the risk of reinfection if you are not careful about safe sex practices.
Chlamydial Resistance To Individual Antibiotic Classes
Chlamydiae are known to acquire resistance through mutations to six major classes of antibiotics. Both naturally acquired and laboratory-generated resistance found in selected chlamydial strains have facilitated the study of conserved biological pathways, such as peptidoglycan synthesis, folate synthesis and methionine synthesis, which cannot be approached directly in the chlamydial system . The ability to generate resistant mutants has supported new experimental methods that facilitate recombination and transformation in or between Chlamydiae in vitro . The following sections will describe resistance phenotypes that are stably expressed by Chlamydiae in cell culture systems.
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What Can Be Done To Address The Problem
Klausner says a three-way approach is needed:
- Control the spread of new infections through prevention, screening, and treatment. However, there is much less funding for such efforts. The CDC says that more than half of state and local STD programs have seen budget cuts in years. âThe money taken out of budgets absolutely correlates with the increases in cases of STDs that weâre seeing,â Englund says.
- Develop new antibiotics. Thereâs good news here: A new antibiotic now being tested has shown promising results in recent trials. When and if it will be effective and enter the market is unknown.
- Develop tests to identify the best treatments. Klausnerâs lab has developed a test, now in use at UCLA Health System, that can tell physicians which antibiotic a particular case of gonorrhea will respond to. This has allowed them to successfully treat many cases of gonorrhea with older, less expensive antibiotics.
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How Long Does It Take
It takes about one week for azithromycin to completely cure a chlamydial infection, and in some cases it can take up to two weeks for the infection to clear.
If you are sexually active during this time, you can pass the infection to your partner, even if you have no symptoms. For these reasons, you should avoid having sex of any kind during treatment.
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How Does Chlamydia Spread
Chlamydia is spread when a person has unprotected sex with an infected person.
Because chlamydial infection often has no symptoms, many people do not realise they have the infection.
Even if you know a person well, you may not be able to tell they have an STI, because people can look healthy and still have chlamydia.
Remember, you can get chlamydia and other STIs from a new sexual partner who has in the past had sex with someone who is infected.
It can also be spread from a long-term partner who has had sex with other people.
Chlamydia Can Live In Your Gut And Reinfect You After Youre Cured
Doctors have known that chlamydia can reappear, but until now theyve been stumped as to how exactly it happens
Chlamydia is the most commonly reported sexually transmitted diseases in the United States. Thankfully, its also curable. But new research suggests that for some people, curing chlamydia doesnt prevent reinfection, even if theyre not exposed to it again. Apparently the disease can live inside your gut, and reinfect you out of the blue.
Apparently doctors have known that chlamydia can reappear in cured patients for about 80 years, but theyve been stumped as to how exactly it happens. This study points out that, in many animals, chlamydia has been found to live in the gastrointestinal tract. Thus, if gastrointestinal infection occurs in most hosts, the authors write, then it is very likely that gastrointestinal infection occurs in humans as well.
The study in question doesnt actually test this theory on any human beings. Instead it looks at data in animal models about reinfection, and the failure of certain drugs to treat chlamydia when it lives in the gut. From there, they propose that women who are infected with chlamydia could see the same kind of issues: the drugs theyre given might cure the disease genitally, but not gastrointestinally, leaving the bug to live inside waiting for the right time to strike.
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What Happens If I Dont Get Treated
The initial damage that chlamydia causes often goes unnoticed. However, chlamydia can lead to serious health problems.
If you are a woman, untreated chlamydia can spread to your uterus and fallopian tubes . This can cause pelvic inflammatory disease . PID often has no symptoms, however some women may have abdominal and pelvic pain. Even if it doesnt cause symptoms initially, PID can cause permanent damage to your reproductive system. PID can lead to long-term pelvic pain, inability to get pregnant, and potentially deadly ectopic pregnancy .
Men rarely have health problems linked to chlamydia. Infection sometimes spreads to the tube that carries sperm from the testicles, causing pain and fever. Rarely, chlamydia can prevent a man from being able to have children.
Who Could Benefit From Using Antibiotics For Sti Prophylaxis
People at the highest risk of contracting bacterial STIs, especially those who may be at risk for repeated infections, may benefit most from taking STI prophylaxis. If you do not use condoms consistently, or at all, have multiple sexual partners and have had bacterial STIs in the past, you may be interested in the potential of this approach.
Bacterial STI prophylaxis can be taken regardless of HIV status. Many individuals who are HIV negative and on HIV PrEP use condoms less frequently or have stopped using them altogether. Similarly, some who are living with HIV also choose not to use condoms all of the time as an undetectable viral load prevents HIV transmission.
An accepted public health approach promotes the control of STIs among those at highest risk as a way of reducing STIs in the general population. An Australian modelling study supports this notion: it estimated that if half of Australian gay men took doxycycline as PrEP, and it was 70% effective against syphilis, then rates of syphilis would decrease by 50% after a year and 85% after a decade. Interestingly, the same finding applied if only 50% of the highest-risk group were taking doxycycline. This indicates that targeted interventions could have widespread community-level benefits.
Surveys in Australia, the US and the UK show high levels of interest among gay men and some healthcare providers in using doxycycline to prevent STIs, with some men already using this approach.
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How Does Chlamydia Affect A Pregnant Woman And Her Baby
In pregnant women, untreated chlamydia has been associated with pre-term delivery,34 as well as ophthalmia neonatorum and pneumonia in the newborn. In published prospective studies, chlamydial conjunctivitis has been identified in 18-44% and chlamydial pneumonia in 3-16% of infants born to women with untreated chlamydial cervical infection at the time of delivery.9-12 Neonatal prophylaxis against gonococcal conjunctivitis routinely performed at birth does not effectively prevent chlamydial conjunctivitis.37-39
Screening and treatment of chlamydia in pregnant women is the best method for preventing neonatal chlamydial disease. All pregnant women should be screened for chlamydia at their first prenatal visit. Pregnant women under 25 and those at increased risk for chlamydia should be screened again in their third trimester. Pregnant women with chlamydial infection should be retested 3 weeks and 3 months after completion of recommended therapy.40
Box 1diseases Caused By Chlamydiae
Ocular
It is estimated that 40 million individuals worldwide have active trachoma caused by singular or mixed infections of Chlamydia trachomatis, Chlamydia pneumoniae and Chlamydia psittaci . An additional 8.2 million have trichiasis and 1.3 million are blind as a result of ocular infections caused by chlamydia. Particular strains of C. trachomatis that cause trachoma are hyperendemic to regions of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Asia and parts of South and Central America however, the distribution and involvement of C. pneumoniae and C. psittaci strains in active trachoma cases around the world is currently unknown . Transmission occurs through both direct and indirect contact, and roughly 25% of all individuals infected are children under the age of 10 years. However, serious disease and blindness is found in older individuals caused by cumulative scarification left by untreated infections .
Genital
Sexually transmitted infections caused by C. trachomatis are the most prevalent bacterial cause of sexually transmitted infections worldwide, and around 92 million men and women are estimated to be infected . The majority of infections are asymptomatic in both men and women, but if left untreated can result in a variety of pathologies, including urethritis, cervicitis, salpingitis, pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility .
Respiratory
Arthritis
Zoonotic respiratory infections
Veterinary
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How Do You Get Chlamydia
Chlamydia is usually passed on through unprotected vaginal, anal or oral sex.
Chlamydia can be passed on through genital contact. This means you can get chlamydia from someone who has the infection if your genitals touch, even if you dont have sex or ejaculate .
You can also get chlamydia if you come into contact with infected semen or vaginal fluid, or get them in your eye.
Chlamydia cant be passed on through kissing, hugging, sharing towels or using the same toilet as someone with the infection.
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Your Partner Didn’t Get Treated
If you have a consistent sexual partner, it’s important to tell them about your infection. They likely will need to get treated too.
Once you’ve both gotten treated, you have to wait until the treatment has had time to work before you start having sex again. This is especially true of unprotected sex.
You want to avoid passing the STD back and forth between the two of you. Without taking these important steps, it’s possible for this to happen. Such a cycle would prolong the STD and its symptoms.
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How Long Does It Take To Get Rid Of Chlamydia
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How long does it take to get rid of chlamydia?
It depends. If youre diagnosed with chlamydia, your health care provider will probably prescribe an antibiotic. In some cases, treatment is possible with a single dose of medication in the health care providers office. Other medications must be taken for seven days. Its important to make sure that you take the antibiotic exactly as directed for as long as its prescribed even if your symptoms go away. Avoid having sex until your treatment is complete and the infection is cured. Its also important to let your sex partner know that you have chlamydia so they can get tested and treated, too. Some health care providers will give you medications to take home to your partner.
Chlamydia is a sexually transmitted infection thats caused by a type of bacteria called chlamydia trachomatis. Both women and men can get it by having unprotected vaginal or anal sex with an infected partner. It can also be spread from a woman to her fetus during birth, and rarely, from the hand to the eye and, less likely, during unprotected oral sex. Each year, more than three million people of all ages become infected with chlamydia.
How Soon Can I Have Sex Again
Dont have oral, vaginal or anal sex, or use sex toys, until you and your partner have both finished the treatment and any symptoms have gone. This is to help prevent you being re-infected or passing the infection on to someone else.
If youre given antibiotic treatment called azithromycin, youll still need to avoid sex for seven days after starting the treatment as thats how long it takes to work.
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