There’s a new disease that’s spreading across the world that can’t be cured by conventional medicine and – guess what? – the Japanese gave it to us.
After being on the decline for years, the clap is back and meaner than ever. A new strain of gonorrhea that’s resistant to virtually every drug we know of originated in Japan and has jumped continents already into America and Europe. How did this happen, and is it Japan’s fault?
In the early 2000s, Japanese doctors reported men coming into Japanese hospitals reporting the symptoms of gonorrhea. They were treated, but the symptoms persisted.
The disease has since slowly spread throughout the world, starting in the west coast of the US and now Europe. (Are the Olympics to blame?) At this point, it’s basically gone out of control and there’s no real way to fight it.
Is there any reason that this came from Japan in particular? Did all of those body pillows create some sort of unique environment for the superbug to develop?
Probably not. Diseases mutate, that’s a basic fact of life. It happens all the time all around the world and this time it just happened to occur in Japan. The fact that this new strain of gonorrhea came out of Japan is just a coincidence.
Even though this new version of the clap didn’t happen because of anything that had to do with Japan, I wondered if this could have been prevented. I’d heard some strange things about contraception in Japan before, but hadn’t really looked into it.
After some research, I found that there’s not much that could have been done to stop the spread; the Japanese have plenty of access to contraception, but it’s just . . . different.
In the US, contraception is pretty plentiful; there are tons of different kinds to choose from, from the pill to the patch to IUDs to condoms. You see Trojan commercials on TV and sit through an ad for the Nuva Ring before watching your show on Hulu.
Contraception in Japan isn’t as available in as many forms. Condoms, the only form of contraception that can conceivably be used to stop the spread of gonorrhea, are really common in Japan, but after that it diverges from the US.
Take the pill, for instance. It’s available in Japan, but it hasn’t been for long, and is harder to get a hold of in Japan than the US. There’s still this weird stigma surrounding it that doesn’t exist in Japan.
People lobbied for the pill for decades before it was approved by the Japanese government, but the pill was only approved after Viagra was approved in six months.
Because of this stigma, a lot of women are still pretty skeptical of the pill and stay away from it altogether, opting instead for other forms of birth control.
But those attitudes are changing little by little, just as gender roles in general are generally shifting over the years.
If you’re in Japan and want to get contraception, I would highly recommend checking out Surviving in Japan, which has a ton of information about all different kinds of contraception and how to get them in Japan.
The bottom line here is to be careful when you bump uglies, or else you might get an unwanted souvenir from Japan.