Two Day Magazine

Changing the Way We Look at Our Most Intimate Interactions...

Love. It is a beautiful and powerful emotion that leads to intimacy between people. Sex. Sex can follow love, sex can create love, sex can mimic love, sex can thrive without love. We know the two often times are linked. But, did you ever stop to think how our sex lives and love lives affect the spread and evolution of STDs?

Many diseases are spread by viruses. Viruses can mutate rapidly to better infect new hosts--meaning us. By taking a closer look at our interactions with each other, we can begin to understand how diseases adapt to thrive and survive, and therefore find better and more effective ways at thwarting them.

Think of how you interact with your partner or multiple partners on a daily basis. Some of us are in long-term, committed relationships, while some of us prefer short-term sexual encounters that connect us only momentarily. The old model for studying disease  was based on the assumption that people encountered each other at random, whether it be on a subway or in a mall or any other crowded public place. Diseases were assumed to be hopping from one host to the next, until the area reached maximum infection.

But, this “one size fits all model” has its shortcomings because we all interact with each other differently, and thereby, ‘attract’ to ourselves viruses that are more suited to infect a person in a particular environment. American Naturalist suggests that some strains of viruses are better at infecting those who philander and have multiple partners, while other viruses are better at infecting people in monogamous relationships. For example, highly transmittable (meaning those viruses hop from one person to another easily) strains are more likely to infect people in non-monogamous relationships, while highly infectious strains (meaning they take root in the body for a longer period of time) thrive in monogamous relationships.

Recently, a group of scientists that were studying sexually transmitted diseases came to the conclusion that the “length of time people stay together determines which infectious diseases circulate in a community and therefore how disease evolve multiple strains.” (http://www.livescience.com)

“Just think of the behavioral differences between village and city life: one with quiet streets and few new faces, and the other with thousands of hurrying people and crowded public transport,” states Ken Eames, a coauthor of the study from the University of Warwick. This also explains how two different strains of a disease can co-exist in a specific population without the threat of eradicating each other.

Since these findings extend broadly, this model can easily be applied to studying the spread of STDs in our society. “It’s an issue for all sorts of disease, many infections are spread through social contacts in a household or an office, for example, and those contacts also tend to be long lasting.” Eams believes.

So, whether you are in a long-term relationship, or just hooking up at a club, each human interaction connects us to one another in profound ways. The more we know about how we interact with each other, with the most intimate interaction being sexual relationships, the more we can learn about what we can do to prevent the spread of these highly adaptable viruses and learn to express love for one another in ways that create positive interactions in our environment, leaving no room for viruses to thrive!