Guest posting by Emile Gleeson
When being diagnosed with an STD, there are many thoughts that run through a patient’s mind: Am I going to be okay? How did this happen? Who infected me? How could I have stopped this from happening? Is this treatable? How will this affect my life?. However, one of the most important questions is often not on this list: Who else could I have affected between contracting the STD and being diagnosed?. Of course, the patient is not to blame for thinking mainly of themselves in a time of personal crisis such as this, but then someone else must be responsible for thinking of the others that could also be infected. Luckily, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a very clear process set up for this. The image below is a flowchart from the CDC’s website of the process of identifying and STD testing/counseling past partners of those recently diagnosed with an STD.
Although this flowchart may seem extremely complicated at first glance, it is actually a very logical, straightforward process. Essentially, as many potentially-affected partners as possible are identified and tested, and then the process repeats if they receive a positive test result. Seems easy, right? But look a little closer and you will see that there are many places to simply dropoff the flowchart: if the patient claims that they haven’t had any partners, if the patient refuses to name their partners, if the patient dies before naming partners, if the patient moves out of jurisdiction before naming partners, the list goes on. In an ideal world, every patient diagnosed with an STD would reveal the names of anyone else they may have infected/been infected from so that they could all get tested as well, but in reality, this simply doesn’t happen, which leaves many at-risk people completley unaware of the fact that they may very likely have been exposed to an STD. These people are then unable to take the necessary precautions and can continue spreading the STD until they finally show enough symptoms to be diagnosed as well.
Although this flowchart may make it seem that the CDC already has this process of informing those potentially at-risk of STDs figured out, the truth is that they don’t. They’ve done an excellent job setting up this system so far, but it still has farther to go. Now that this process is in place, we need to find a way to get more diagnosed individuals to reveal ALL of their partners. Until this happens, this will still be an incomplete system and people will still be going about their daily lives completely unaware that they were exposed to an STD.
Source: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5709a1.htm