True or false: what you think you know about STIs

This quiz is not there to catch you out: it is there to spot ideas that have aged. Much of what people believe about these infections comes from 1990s campaigns, and two things have changed since — HIV treatment, which removes transmission, and testing, now simple and often free.

After each answer the correction comes straight away, with a link to the page that goes further.

Three things to keep

• Effective treatment removes HIV transmission. It is the most important change of the past twenty years, and the least known.
• Most of these infections cannot be seen. The only way to know is a test, and the only useful moment is after the window period.
• Two of them are preventable by vaccine — hepatitis B and HPV — and a third has an emergency treatment in the hours after exposure.

Read next

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• The infections, one by one
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