A dental dam is a thin square of latex that is placed over a woman’s vulva before her partner performs oral sex on her and acts as a barrier between the vulva and the mouth. To decrease your chances of getting gonorrhea during oral sex on a female, you can use a dental dam as a barrier between the mouth and vulva. Condoms do decrease your chances of getting gonorrhea during vaginal sex or during oral sex with a male, but it’s important for both partners to get tested because it’s easy to get re-infected if one partner still has it.

If you test positive for gonorrhea, get tested again three (3) months later to make sure you don’t have it again.

The only method that is 100% effective in preventing STIs is abstinence, but if you’re sexually active, the best way to avoid gonorrhea is to be mutually monogamous with someone who has tested negative for gonorrhea. How can you protect yourself from getting gonorrhea? If you get antibiotic pills, make sure you take them all even if you start to feel better – otherwise the infection might not go away completely. If you do end up having sex while the antibiotics are still working it is really important to use a condom or else it is likely the medicine you took won’t work. To keep from infecting your partners, you should avoid sex until you have taken all the antibiotics and your partner has been tested and treated if necessary. A clinician may give you an antibiotic shot along with other medicine to take in the clinic, or he or she may prescribe pills. Your doctor may also collect a swab sample from the vagina, cervix, urethra, rectum or throat during a physical exam. How do you test for gonorrhea?Īny clinician can do a simple and painless urine test to find out if you have gonorrhea. A few women have pain when they pee or pain in their lower abdomen. Men might experience burning when they pee, a white, yellow, or green discharge from the penis, or painful, swollen testicles. Men are more likely to have symptoms than women. Most people who have it don’t know it because they don’t have symptoms. You can get gonorrhea from contact with any of these areas on someone who is infected – that includes all types of sex, including oral, vaginal, and anal sex. The bacteria that causes gonorrhea likes to live in moist areas of the body like the vagina, penis, eyes, throat, and rectum. In 2016, over 450,000 cases of gonorrhea were reported to the CDC in the US. Infections are particularly common in young people, and less than half of those infections are reported and treated. In California alone, there were over 75,000 reported cases of gonorrhea in 2017.

Gonorrhea symptoms in the throat