Science is here to save your ass yet again. This time, it is from the most commonly reported bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the United States.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chlamydia is three times more common for people ages 14-24 than it is in higher age groups. Like most high school and college students, you really just don't want to go get tested for STI's. We often tell ourselves that we have no symptoms, so we are fine. It sounds like a very convincing argument in our minds. The problem is that Chlamydia (along with many other STI's) often displays no symptoms at all according to the CDC.
Antibiotics can help if the disease is caught early enough, but if it isn't caught until later, they won't be effective. Trust me when I say that you want to be protected from this disease because it can cause infertility and even blindness later on in life.
You can thank Harvard Medical School (who would have guessed?) for this new development. They were the scientists who decided to stick Chlamydia in a mouse so they could study how the infection runs its course. This allowed them to create the vaccine. This is the best part yet: the vaccine is administered through a mucosal membrane – this means most likely through the nose. So it won't even hurt when you get it!
As you might expect, the vaccine still has indefinite animal and human trials to go through before it will be on the market. This means we still have to endure the embarrassment of getting tested for STI's once in while (seriously, keep yourself safe). The good news is that this has sparked a whirlwind of ideas for scientists to work with, one of which was a vaccine for HIV. What will all of these new vaccines mean for future high school and college students a few years down the road? All I can say is "cups in the air, everybody let's take shots."
Sources:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/65380/new-vaccine-chlamydia-works
http://www.cdc.gov/std/chlamydia/stdfact-chlamydia-detailed.htm
