National STIQ Day

National STIQ day was introduced in 2010 and every year since then the 14^th of January has been dedicated to raising awareness for STIQ.  The purpose is to emphasize the importance of sexual health and to encourage everyone to get regular health checks.

Sexually Transmissible Infections (STIs) are infections passed from one person to another through unprotected vaginal, oral, or anal sex, or genital contact.

Lack of symptoms

More and more people in the UK are catching STIs and each year the infection rate is rising. According to The World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1 million STIs are acquired every day and the majority of these STIs have no symptoms.¹ Therefore you could have an STI and not be aware. 70% of women and 50% of men show no symptoms after contracting Chlamydia which is the most common STI condition in the UK.² 

Even though the majority of the time symptoms of STIs aren’t visible, there can be signs of having an STI, including unusual discharge from the vagina, penis or anus, pain when peeing, lumps or skin growth around the genitals, a rash, unusual bleeding, itchiness or blisters around the genitals.³

What to do when you catch an STI

Anyone can catch an STI regardless of what age you are, your sexuality or how many sexual partners you have, as it only takes one sexual encounter to put you at the risk of catching an STI. A shocking fact from Public Health England shows that a case of chlamydia or gonorrhea is diagnosed in a young person every 4 minutes in England, and over 144,000 diagnoses of these sexually transmitted infections are seen in people aged 15 to 24 in 2017. ⁴

It is extremely important to get routinely tested. The earlier the diagnosis is made and treated the less chance of having long-term effects including infertility.

Randox Biosciences 10-plex STI test

Randox Biosciences would like to take the opportunity to support STIQ day by offering our CE marked 10-plex STI test, a cost-effective solution for accurate STI testing. This test detects the following 10 infections simultaneously from a single patient urine sample.

• Neisseria gonorrhoea (NG)
• Mycoplasma genitalium (MG)
• Ureaplasma urealyticum (UU)
• Chlamydia trachomatis (CT)
• Trichomonas vaginalis (TV)
• Haemophilus ducreyi (HD)
• Mycoplasma hominis (MH)
• Treponema pallidum (TP)
• Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1)
• Herpes simplex virus 2 (HSV-2)

Does your laboratory or clinic carry out STI testing? Our molecular analyser, the Bosch Vivalytic, powered by our award winning Biochip Array Technology, could be the diagnostic solution.

For more information about our STI Arrays or Vivalytic email: info@randoxbiosciences.com

1. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sexually-transmitted-infections-(stis)
2. http://www.national-awareness-days.com/stiq-day/
3. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/an-sti-is-diagnosed-in-a-young-person-every-4-minutes-in-england
4. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sexually-transmitted-infections-stis/