Symptoms can occur within 2-14 days after infection. However, a person may have chlamydia for months, or even years, without knowing it.
Chlamydia can be cured with antibiotics from a health care provider. However, if chlamydia is left untreated, it can cause permanent damage. Your risk of getting other STIs, like gonorrhea or HIV, increases. In males, untreated chlamydia can lead to sterility (inability to make sperm).
If untreated, chlamydia can spread into the uterus or fallopian tubes and cause pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), a serious infection of the reproductive organs. PID can cause damage in your fallopian tubes.
Chlamydia often has no symptoms, but it can cause serious health problems, even without symptoms. If symptoms occur, they may not appear until several weeks after having sex with a partner who has chlamydia.
An untreated chlamydia infection can persist for several years. Although this goes for both men and women, it is believed that men are less likely to carry the bacteria for several years. If you remain infected for a long time you have an increased risk of complications.
Chlamydia can lie dormant in your body for many years and cause a low-grade infection that rarely presents any flare-ups. There is a greater chance of flare-up if your immune system has become weakened due to a cold or flu, cancer, HIV, or other severe illnesses.
Without medical intervention, a chlamydia infection can persist for years if gone unnoticed [1]. Fortunately, once diagnosed, a healthcare provider can provide patients with the right medication to treat the sexually transmitted infection (STI).
There is no clear timeline on how long it may take for this to occur - while one study suggests that after exposure to the bacteria, it can take a few weeks for PID to develop, the NHS estimates that 1 in 10 women with untreated chlamydia could go on to develop PID within a year.
What is late-stage chlamydia? Late-stage chlamydia refers to an infection that has spread to other parts of the body. For example, it may have spread to the cervix (cervicitis), testicular tubes (epididymitis), eyes (conjunctivitis), or throat (pharyngitis), causing inflammation and pain.
While long-term problems in men are rare, some men with untreated chlamydia may develop epididymitis. This refers to inflammation in the epididymis, a coiled tube at the back of the testicles that is responsible for storing and carrying sperm.
Chlamydia is very common: it's the most frequently reported infectious disease in Australia, and nearly 97,000 men and women are diagnosed with it each year. If you're sexually active and under 30 years of age, you are at the highest risk of contracting chlamydia.
Symptoms can develop within a few days or weeks, but sometimes they do not appear until months or even years later.
Although chlamydia is highly contagious, it does not always transmit to a person's sexual partners. It is also possible to have a false-negative test result. Having more frequent sex with a partner who has chlamydia may increase a person's risk of contracting it.
Chlamydia can be easily treated, however if it goes left untreated, it can cause infertility (you may not be able to babies).
The only way to properly check for the presence of this sexually-transmitted infection is through a laboratory test. A swab is taken from just inside the urethra in men or from the urethra or cervix in women, and then sent to a lab for identification.
It's quite another to learn you have an STI while you're in a monogamous relationship. If you have been totally faithful, you may assume that your partner acquired the infection while being unfaithful. Though it's possible they may have been intimate with someone else, it's also possible they never cheated at all.
Yes! Even if you're in a long-term, monogamous relationship, it's possible for you or your partner to have a previously undiagnosed and untreated STI.
Chlamydia cannot be passed on through casual contact, such as kissing and hugging, or from sharing baths, towels, swimming pools, toilet seats or cutlery.
Nope! Chlamydia is easily cured with antibiotics. Chlamydia is a bacterial infection (like strep throat or an ear infection), which means that once you've been treated and tested negative for it (to make sure the antibiotics worked), it's gone.
No, Chlamydia infections will not go away on their own. In some cases, a Chlamydia infection can be fought off by the body's immune system, but these cases are rare and should not influence anyone's decisions to get tested or treated.
What are the symptoms? Symptoms can occur within 2-14 days after infection. However, a person may have chlamydia for months, or even years, without knowing it.
Chlamydia is most common among young people. Two-thirds of new chlamydial infections occur among youth aged 15-24 years. Estimates show that 1 in 20 sexually active young women aged 14-24 years has chlamydia. Disparities persist among racial and ethnic minority groups.