The 10 countries with the highest STD rates in the developed world serve as a reminder that no matter how far we have come combating diseases, the war is yet to be won. Several methods have been developed by modern science and medicine to ensure that the spread of such diseases is contained.These include encouraging the usage of condoms, which can significantly help in containing sexually transmitted diseases. In fact, using protection for sex is considered to be one of the leading reasons behind the drop in the rate of STDs in the developed world. However, unfortunately, not many people tend to follow this advice. Young people are more likely to abstain from using condoms as they tend to believe that it ruins or at least decreases the pleasure of sex. Combine that mentality with young people also believing that they are invincible, and you can understand why we still have high rates of STDs today, even in the developed world.
STDs are generally not life-threatening, especially bearing in mind the diseases which we have considered to determine the countries in the developed world with high STD rates. Chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis are some of the most common sexually transmitted diseases present across the world. While the fight against HIV has been largely successful, the same attention has not been given to these three diseases since they are not considered to be life-threatening.
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Among heterosexuals, the issue is not so significant, but the diseases are especially prevalent among men who have sex with men as well as bisexuals. These two categories make up the bulk of the cases, and attempts to deal with this problem have not been very successful, especially in recent times. To counter this, the governments in most countries are spreading awareness by convincing people to stay with one partner, or practice monogamy. However, as seen by the high rates of STDs still present, it is hard to convince people to be monogamous.
So what are the countries which have the biggest STD problem in the developed world? Well, that was not an easy question to answer. We initially considered the countries which should be counted among the developed ones. For that, we only selected the top 40 countries in the Human Development Index. If you’re more interested in HIV specifically, you might want to visit the 11 Countries with the Highest HIV Rates in the World. Unfortunately, there are no global organizations which carry out studies in this respect on a global scale. Luckily for us, most of these countries belonged to Europe, and hence, the European Surveillance Report was our primary resource in this respect. For other countries, we used separate resources for each country. While the report provided us with the total cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, to determine the rates, we divided the aforementioned cases with the total population of each country and then ranked them according to the rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis for each country. Let’s see which are those unfortunate countries with the highest STD rates in the developed world.
