INFECTIONS CAN TRANSMITTED DURING ORAL SEX
Oral sex involves placing your mouth to a partner’s genital area. Many couples take great pleasure in oral sex. Performing oral sex on a female partner is called cunnilingus, and performing oral sex on a male partner is called fellatio. STDs can be transmitted through oral contact, however, so you must know how to help protect yourself from becoming infected in this way.
Many people still think that STDs, particularly HIV, cannot be transmitted through oral sex. This may be assumed by some because, early in the HIV epidemic, unprotected anal and vaginal intercourse were seen as high-risk behaviors, and unprotected oral sex was seen as low risk or no risk, since saliva does not carry a sufficient quantity of HIV for it to spread infection. The risk of HIV transmission is probably lower with oral sex than with anal or vaginal sex, but it is not zero.
There are documented cases of HIV transmission from both receiving and giving oral sex, though there are few studies of how often people become infected after a certain type of sexual contact. Obviously it is not ethical to perform studies in which people are exposed to HIV horn a particular sex act to find out how many of them become infected, so reliable statistics are not available. The Centers for Disease Control includes oral sex on its list of risky behaviors for acquiring HIV But HIV is not the only sexually transmitted infection to consider; others—such as gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis—can easily be transmitted via oral sex with an infected partner.
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