"[Genital] Herpes is Forever"

This is going to be a messy and unorganized read. Bear with me, as I'm really just writing down my thoughts on an issue I have been mulling about since even before I met the Mr., and had an avenue in which to apply this.

I know I've been MIA for a bit, but this is an issue I have been wanting to blog about for sometime now. As some of you may know, the Mr. and I are in the middle of our wedding festivities. Yesterday, I received some good news from Kaiser Permanente. What's the good news you may ask? I was tested for STD/I's last week. Simple test, I went in for blood work and was out in 15 minutes. Yesterday, I called the advice nurse and she confirmed that I had come in negative on all of the tests.

Who cares? Everybody should! I keep hearing stories about Muslim men and women getting married, assuming their partner had a virginal past and then receiving a less than desired wedding present. I'm talking about HIV, and a gang of various other fun infections.

According to Wikipedia's page on STD/I's, a few of the possible gifts to be concerned with include:

HIV

Genital Herpes

Chlamydia

Gonorrhea

Shall I continue?

I do have a virginal past, so why the testing? Because I'm so confident in my answer, I am willing to prove it. Everybody claims they have an angelic past. What's to require a person to tell the God honest truth when asked about a pre-marital sexual history. Additionally, how does one get around the rule about not asking others to air their sins?

So the first problem, is the question. How do you ask it? Should you even ask it? Can you ensure a truthful answer?

The second problem is the answer. Assuming you received a truthful confession: if God forgives all, who are you to hold a person's sins against them? Further, even if a person has not had any sexual opportunity to contract the diseases there is still the reality that some of them can be contracted in other ways or even without actual intercourse.

My recommended solution: STD/I testing. It does a few things:

1) It saves you from having to ask uncomfortable sexual history questions

2) It ensures you are making a fully informed decision regarding what is supposed to be a lifelong commitment

3) Even if you're angelic, and your significant other claims you will be there first, still getting tested helps normalize the process for the community. We have a problem, Muslim individuals are passing STD/I's to their new spouses and by getting everybody on board to get tested we can work towards minimizing that problem.

4) People will no longer be able to get out of testing by questioning trust, if everybody is getting tested

Remember Genital Herpes is forever.

HPV? Herpes? Chlamydia?

I'm thankful for Islam, for giving me an alternative.

I'm thankful for my parents, for laying a proper foundation allowing me to attend the sex ed. classes in middle school.

AND I'm thankful for Carl Rice and Rushiko Nishikuni, for teaching the sex ed. classes in middle school. Islam and parents aside, those two put the fear of HIV and herpes in my heart.

This is sad, sad news:

One in four teenage girls has an STD! Start panicking now!

If you've been watching the news or reading the newspaper for the past two days, that's probably what you've heard. If you're a teenage girl, you've probably checked yourself in the bathroom at least once to make sure there's nothing new going on down there. What's causing all the chaos?

A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease. The most common infection the study found was the human papillomavirus or HPV. A whopping 18 percent of teen girls apparently have the virus. Compare that to the 40 percent of the girls ages 14-19 in the study who were sexually active, and that means almost half of all young women who are having sex have contracted the disease.

Coming in at a very distant second in the study was chlamydia. The bacterial infection showed up in 4 percent of the women tested.

"Women are often without symptoms for chlamydia," said Fred Wyand of the American Social Health Association. "It's not like you assume, with itching and burning. People don't always know they have it. The CDC recommends all sexually active women 25 and under get screened for chlamydia."

Full Story: MTV News