Welcome to Travelturtle, the travel health advice site that provides you with country specific medical and vaccination reports usually only available to registered UK healthcare professionals.
Use the information below to get a full and frank guide to sexual health abroad. Information includes:
- A focus on STI’s. Avoidance of STI diseases and prevention methods in relation to foreign sexual diseases.
- Full information is provided in regards to types of sexual disease abroad, promotion of safe sex abroad, and intrinsic advice on safe sex tips for travellers.
- A comprehensive listing of STI diseases is available, as well as guides on how to prevent foreign sexual disease and practice safe sex abroad.
- Information regarding immunisation packages that can be obtained prior to travel.
Sex and travel
Sex and travel
Sex is part of travel. For busy couples grabbing some time together, tourists seeking adventure and new experiences, or backpackers meeting up with new crowds, it plays a key role in the experience of being abroad. One in 10 British travellers reports having sex with a new partner abroad and only 75 per cent say they used a condom on every occasion.
Every year, 250 million people around the world contract a sexually transmitted disease.
Who gets STIs?
Risky situations for sexual health abroad
- casual sexual relations without barrier contraception
- encounters with sex workers; in some countries 100 per cent of prostitutes have sexually transmitted diseases, so once is enough
- use of drugs and alcohol, which increase risk-taking behaviour
- condoms bought locally may be inferior, or not available
- frequent sexual activity – the more times someone has sex with an infected partner the more likely they are to catch the disease
- large number of partners
- sex with high-risk partners, such as intravenous drug users, homosexuals, bisexual men and those with multiple partners.
What diseases are transmitted by sex?
- HIV / AIDS is transmitted both sexually and via blood
- hepatitis B is also a sexually and blood transmitted disease
- gonorrhoea
- syphilis
- herpes
- chlamydia
- warts
Prevention of foreign sexual diseases
- Sex with a regular, non-infected partner is the surest method of prevention.
- Practice safe sex abroad – condoms should always be used, and from the start of sex as herpes and warts can be caught via skin to skin transmission
- It is rarely possible to tell who is infected. In a survey, 47% of men and 60% of women said they had been lied to for the purpose of sex – 34% of men and 10% of women admitted they would lie.
- Condoms do not give 100% protection.
- Oral sex also carries risks, which condoms can reduce.
- Consider hepatitis B immunisation.
Other measures
- The standard of facilities for treating STIs may not be as good abroad as in the UK.
- Mutual or simultaneous masturbation is another form of safe sex.
