Diseases, Sexually Transmitted
Diseases, Sexually Transmitted.Venereal diseases, or as the military currently defines them, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), occur most often in sexually active people less than twenty‐four years of age. Because military forces historically have consisted of mostly young people, predominantly young men, often sexually active, the incidence of STD in military personnel has always been two to three times that of a similar matched group of civilians. This rate can rise five to eight times higher during wartime.
Some form of STDs seems to have plagued military forces from earliest recorded history. Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E. wrote that Scythian soldiers who pillaged the Celestial Temple of Venus were infected with a “female disease” that afflicted all of their descendants. The first recorded cases of syphilis appeared in Europe in 1493 supposedly among Spanish sailors returning from the New World. Spanish and French armies soon...
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