As microbes go, those of venereal diseases in the strict sense have a certain weakness, and if you can imagine such a thing, they are fastidious! Compared with other microbes, which survive and multiply in many different environments, these VD microbes grow, in nature, only in man. Outside of his tissues they not only fail to grow but are very quickly killed. Again, the diseases they produce in man have a common feature-maybe only one: at some stage in their course, usually early, the microbes are concentrated on sexual (and other moist) surfaces, and at this stage there is either no pain at all, or anyway the afflicted person is not too sick for sexual activity. The microbes' delicacy, their inability to survive outside human tissues, prevents them from being transmitted from one person to another by any sort of indirect means-through air or water (or on toilet seats). Their inability to infect other animals in nature prevents them from being spread by animals or insects. For practical purposes, under the cultural conditions we know best, the only way left for them to maintain themselves, which requires that they find themselves a fresh host every so often, is sexual contact. So they are distinctively sexual, or venereal, diseases; and however much they differ among themselves in all other respects, they are linked together by all the physical, social, cultural, and emotional oddities of human sexual behavior.

In other respects the venereal diseases differ widely. Briefly, and only to help us get started, gonorrhea, the commonest of the lot, usually starts as an acute infection of the urethra or the vagina. Untreated, it tends to become chronic and to spread especially to the Fallopian tubes, the joints, and the heart. There is a nonvenereal form that affects the eyes of babies as they are born and leads to blindness, a calamity easily prevented by routine treatment of babies' eyes at birth. The gonococcus is a member of a common class of parasitic bacteria. Magnified a little more than a thousand times it looks like a partly deflated balloon a little smaller than the head of a pin, punched in on one side. Usually they are found as pairs with the punched-in sides together.

About The Author
David Crawford is the CEO and owner of a Male Enhancement Products company known as Male Enhancement Group which is dedicated to researching and comparing male enhancement products in order to determine which male enhancement product is safer and more effective than other products on the market. Copyright 2011 David Crawford of Top Male Enhancement This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.