What STDs can be checked through bloodwork? I know herpes can, but are there others? I want to get checked out, but don’t necessary want the “cotton swab in the urethra” test.
When you visit the doctor’s office for the “typical” STD tests, what do they test for and what are the tests?
Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C, HIV, syphillis to name a few. I’d think swabs would be for STIs like genital warts.
I’m assuming you’re a guy.
Gonorrhea and chlamydia can now be reliably detected in men via urine sample rather than urethral swab.
Serum testing for Herpes Simplex isn’t all that helpful. Nearly everyone is positive for HSV I, which can appear in the genitals, but is more common in the oral cavity. HSV II can appear in the oral cavity even tho it’s more common in the genitals. Best way to know about HSV is to get a swab of the lesion while it’s active.
Hepatitis B & C are best diagnosed by blood tests, as is syphilis.
There’s no reliable test for trichomonas for males, in females a vaginal swab is used to diagnose it.
HPV and genital warts in men are diagnosed by visual inspection.
There’s no single good test for LGV that’s generally available.
Oh, and HIV of course is a blood test.
Does that mean that one could get a blood test for herpes and it might not show up?
Not likely, blood serum testing of HSV (herpes simplex) is pretty accurate with both good sensitivity and specificity, even type specificity, that is distinguishing type-I (oral) from type II (genital).
http://www.ashastd.org/pdfs/blood_test.pdf
But, frankly, the tests are still of very little clinical value.
You can have a positive serum test and not be contagious, and even with a positive test, studies have found that someone knowing their positive for herpes does very little to change their sexual behavior.
If someone is showing symptoms, they can be treated with some different antivirals, but I don’t think it’s common to prescribe those anti-virals if they don’t have a history of recurring episodes.
So, the test will tell you you’ve got herpes, but what are you going to do about it?
Are you having any symptoms? Why do you want to get checked?
Dammit, I’m not quick enough. Lab test questions don’t come up often, but it looks like Qadgop answered the question. Referring to the trichomonas I’ll just add, anecdotally, that those cute little buggers (cute as long as they’re not in my urine specimen), can also be identified while examining a urine sediment microscopically. As well as ‘clue cells’ which are indicitive of gonorrhea.
Roboto, do you have health insurance? Because if you do it’s quite easy to make an appointment and request a simple screening of all these STDs. My friend did this just a short while ago. Pop in and get all your results a week later.
Visual? So how do you know if it’s genital warts or just a common wart on the genitals? Isn’t there a difference?
Either way, wet prep or urine sediment, every time I see one swim through the field, I start singing RunDMC’s “It’s Tricky”, probably much to the horror of my lab colleagues. 
Ha! It is impossible to horrify a real laboratorian. I always felt sorry for whatever poor marketing major, or engineer that had to sit at the table next to ours back in the cafe when I was still in school. The horrors we would discuss. If it wasn’t the odd stuff from clinical chemistry, then it was the downright disgusting, like our 5 weeks spent in parasitology.
One day our professor told us about ptomaine poisoning, which is an outdated term for a type of food borne illness. Basically it’s seen in areas of great poverty, because to get it goes way beyond just eating food past the expiration date, or a mayo sandwich left in the sun. Ptomaines were supposed to be a group of chemical substances like putrescine and cadaverine (as pleasant as their name sounds) that were formed by the rotting process of old food. We’re talking the garbage waste of old food, weeks old, at the bottom of the dumpster.
Basically, if you somehow injested this stuff, you were in bad shape afterwards.
Well, in our class, Paul put some thoughts together at lunch after learning about this. One type of bacterium, Gardnerella vaginalis, is the main cause of bacterial vaginitis. Bad enough infections of *G. vaginalis * can lead to protein proteolysis, producing chemicals like putrescine in the genital area. This causes the foul smell.
Well, putting two and two together at lunch one day, Paul surmised that this meant that you could get food poisoning from “eating too much bad pussy.”
Thank you, goodnight.
Hmm, I’ve never seen TMI kill a thread before…