Safety

Phil Ayesho

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Unless your gums are prone to bleeding, you have a canker sore, or have bit the inside of your cheek lately.
You can also get infected if you have persistent heartburn, as that is an acid burn injury to the lining of the esophagus.

You take a risk anytime you are exposed to someone else's fluids... and that risk multiplies with the number of partners the person you are with has been with.

In particular... STDs are most often transmitted among people who have multiple CONCURRENT partners.

That is, if both people in the equation are in a stable long term relationship, and only once in a great while have brief encountered with another sex partner... their risk is remarkably low.

But if you are routinely having sex with two or 3 people- those others are also more likely to be having sex with two or three people- in an ongoing way- even if you keep to the same 2 or 3 people, you have ten times the risk of infection.

You can, of course, get infected in a single encounter. But epidemiology shows that there is a threshold of risk where transmission becomes almost certain.

For example... There used to be NO viruses on Macintosh computers. This was not because the Mac was immune nor because there were no viruses written to attack macs... it was because only 5% of the computers connected to the internet were macs... which means that the chances of an infected computer 'connecting' with another mac was only 5%- and this made viral propagation essentially ineffective.
But the minute that Macs became more than 12% of the internet connected machines, there was a sudden emergence of mac affecting viruses, because that was the critical threshold for epidemic propagation.

Similarly- heterosexually transmitted HIV and other STDs are far more prevalent in Africa, primarily in those cultures in which men routinely keep one or more mistresses long term ( many of these mistresses being married, themselves to other men who keep mistresses ). Their vectors of infection are several orders of magnitude greater than the average western couple, whose affairs are usually brief, few and far between.

Dentists see herpes and HPV infections in their customers all the time... from oral sex.