Chlamydia is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the UK. It’s passed on through unprotected sex and is particularly common in young adults. It is a nasty infection and has the potential to deliver devastating complications in later life such as infertility.
What are the initial symptoms?
Well, this is one of the main problems as there may be NO symptoms of initial infection. If there are symptoms these tend to be:
- Pain on urination
- Discharge from the vagina or penis
- Women: pain in the tummy, bleeding after sex and bleeding between periods
- Men: pain and swelling in the testicles
Symptoms, if noticeable, usually appear between one and three weeks after having unprotected sex with an infected person. But, for some people, they don’t develop until many months later.
Also, sometimes the symptoms can even disappear after a few days, but the victim remains infectious and can pass it on.
How is it treated?
The good news is that it’s easily treated. A short dose of antibiotics, prescribed by a doctor, will normally do the trick.
The bad news is that, it often goes untreated and is passed on to other people. For instance: at least 70% of women in the UK with chlamydia don’t notice any symptoms. Also, even when the infection is treated with antibiotics, people can still catch it again.
What are the complications of long-term infection?
If chlamydia isn’t treated, it can sometimes spread and cause potentially serious problems in both men and women.
In men it causes inflammation of the testicles, particularly the tubes that carry sperm, causing pain and swelling. It can also cause a generalised inflammation of the testes known as epidymo-orchitis. In the longer term these conditions can cause male infertility.
In women, chlamydia can spread to the womb, ovaries or fallopian tube causing pelvic inflammatory disease (PID).
PID can cause a number of serious problems, such as:
- Infertility
- Chronic pelvic pain
- Increased risk of ectopic pregnancy
Untreated chlamydia during pregnancy may also increase the risk of problems such as premature birth or the baby being born with low birth weight. The disease can also be passed to the baby causing problems like conjunctivitis and in severe cases pneumonia.
So what’s new?
The good news is that it looks like we will soon have a viable vaccine against this nasty infection. A study carried out by researchers at Imperial College in London tested two different formulations of an experimental vaccine on 35 women of childbearing age. While both provoked an immune response, one performed better than the other and produced more antibodies against chlamydia.
Professor Robin Shattock, one of the lead researchers, said, “Chlamydia is very treatable if identified. But as many people don’t have symptoms it can be missed. The biggest problem is that it can go on to cause infertility in women. One of the problems we see is that despite a big screening, test and treat programme, people get repeatedly re-infected. If you could introduce a protective vaccine, you could break that cycle.”
Although more trials are needed to see whether it can fully protect against the chlamydia, progress with the new potential vaccine so far is an important first step.
Professor Shattock is optimistic. He said, “The findings are encouraging. They show the vaccine is safe and produces the type of immune response that could potentially protect against chlamydia.”
At the same time he is cautious with regard to the work that still needs to be done. He said, “The next step is to take the vaccine forward to further trials. But until that’s done, we won’t know whether it is truly protective or not.”
If the trial failed, the fact that they created two versions of a vaccine that created immunity is encouraging. This indicates that researchers are on the right track! Future generations can expect themselves to be protected against this nasty stealth infection.
