Women can have an infection for years and men can be infected for months without knowing. In women, chlamydia usually infects the cervix (the neck of the uterus). In men, it infects the urethra (the tube inside the penis that carries urine and semen) and the testicles.
Symptoms can occur within 2-14 days after infection. However, a person may have chlamydia for months, or even years, without knowing it.
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.
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.
On the other hand, if you don't get tested or don't see a healthcare provider for treatment, chlamydia can live in the body for weeks, months, or even years without being detected. This can lead to long-term complications, including infertility.
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.
As most people do not have symptoms, it is possible the person (who tested positive) could have had chlamydia/gonorrhea from a previous relationship, and has not passed it to their partner yet. It is never 100% that you will pass an STI when you have sex.
How did I get chlamydia if I didn't cheat? You can get chlamydia if your partner had vaginal, oral or anal sex with someone who was infected and then had sex with you.
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.
Most people who have chlamydia don't notice any symptoms.
If you do get symptoms, these usually appear between 1 and 3 weeks after having unprotected sex with an infected person. For some people they don't develop until many months later. Sometimes the symptoms can disappear after a few days.
This leads us to our question of the day –– can chlamydia be dormant and undetected? There are two parts to the answer. First, yes, chlamydia can lie unnoticed for long periods of time. However, even if chlamydia remains asymptomatic, tests can still detect its presence.
Yes, chlamydia can lie dormant in the body, causing a low-grade infection without symptoms.
Although some symptoms can appear within weeks of contact, there have been reports of chlamydia remaining dormant for over twenty years. If you have had recent sexual contact and wonder about chlamydia infections, don't hesitate to test. Listen to your body.
HIV (10+ years)
Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is one of the most well-known examples of an STD that can lie dormant.
This gonorrhea and chlamydia at-home test is a urine test — so a vaginal swab or blood sample is not required. To take the test, simply urinate in a collection cup and place your sample in the mail. We'll send your sample to one of the labs we use for testing (a prepaid shipping label is included within the kit).
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.
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.
You can only get chlamydia from someone already infected with the STI; it's transmitted by vaginal, anal, or oral sex. If you've had it before, you can get reinfected with it, regardless if you were in contact with bodily fluids or not.
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.
If 2 people who don't have any STDs have sex, it's not possible for either of them to get one. A couple can't create an STD from nothing — they have to get spread from one person to another.
Will I Automatically Get an STD If I Sleep with Someone Who Has a STD? No, some sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), also commonly referred to as sexually transmitted infections (STIs), are not transmitted consistently every time an infected person has sex with someone who is not infected.
Your Test Results
Once you are infected, you can infect someone else. Both gonorrhea and chlamydia often have no symptoms. Sometimes only one partner will have symptoms, even though both have the disease. That's why notifying your sexual partners about the results of your test is important.
In women, both a gonorrhea and chlamydia infection might be mistaken for a yeast infection. Women may also experience painful periods, bleeding between periods, pain during sex, or abdominal pain. Although the symptoms overlap, the discharge caused by chlamydia vs. gonorrhea can vary slightly.