Lloyds Pharmacy has developed a new ‘online calculator’ which enables people to calculate the number of indirect sexual partners they have had over their lifetime in order to educate people about the risks of unprotected intercourse.
Despite the fact that men claim to have had an average of 9 partners, and women an average of 6.3, experts warn that by having unprotected sex people are exposed to the sexual infections of literally hundreds and thousands of other people.
The online calculator, humorously called Sex Degrees of Separation, uses data collected from more than 6000 British adults. The way it works is that when people enter the age range of each partner, the calculator uses its database to work out how many previous sexual partners people within that age range have had on average. This process is then repeated for five further ‘generations’ of partner. When these numbers are added together they give a ‘sex degrees of separation’ total.
Research by the The Health Protection Agency suggests that cases of sexually transmitted infections rose by half a per cent to 399,738 last year. This coincides with an increase of eight per cent in Chlamydia between 2006 and 2008.
The head of sexual health at Lloyds pharmacy Claire Kerr believes that people should be aware that when they have unprotected sex with one person that they are, in effect, sleeping with that persons previous partners, and the previous partners of those previous partners and so on.
She added that the simple way to avoid exposing oneself to the dangers of sexually transmitted infections is to use condoms and to get regular sexual health checks when necessary. This is particularly important because the majority of STI’s are easy to treat but, when left untreated, can lead to serious health implications in the future.