Shigella Infections Becoming An STD

From the "color me unsurprised" department, we are facing yet another new STD as a result of a certain demographic. The New York Post reports that shigella infections--which can cause life threatening diarrhea--are increasingly showing up as a sexually transmitted infection. The article explains that "[t]he bacteria spreads through infected poop that gets into the mouth because of ill-washed hands, or swallowing tainted food or water." And you can probably guess where this is headed:

But the population that’s experiencing one of the fastest rises in shigella infection are gay and bisexual men, and other men who have sex with men. Experts say shigella is “endemic” to these communities, meaning it’s constant and regularly present.   

But that is not all. The article adds:

    As shigella spreads rapidly, it’s also becoming harder to manage. The CDC reports that drug-resistant strains of the infection skyrocketed from 0% in 2011 to 8.5% in 2023.

    “This disease has gone from being relatively treatable with off-the-shelf drugs to being close to untreatable over the course of the last decade or so,” Baker said.    

And:

    The CDC reports that most drug-resistant shigella cases affected adult men. The strains of shigella spread through sex are serious. Research shows that those who contracted shigella through sex were hospitalized for four to five days, on average.

    “This isn’t just one form of sexually transmissible diarrhea,” Baker told Science Alert.

    “This is multiple overlapping variants emerging that are all quickly becoming resistant to the drugs we use to treat them. It’s highly likely that if you contracted your Shigella through sex, you require different treatment to someone who contracted it through travel.” 

There is an evolutionary psychological reason why people of this certain demographic have historically been viewed with disgust.  As this Psychology Today article notes:

    Evolutionary psychologists refer to the system that produces such disgust in response to such stimuli as the "Behavioral Immune System" (see Schaller, 2006). This system is behavioral in nature, but it acts very much like our physiological immune system. It works to keep pathogens out of our bodies to benefit our health.

    This will sound a little gross (sorry!), but imagine if someone had a strong preference for the smell of vomit and feces. And that person then sought out such stimuli at any opportunity. (Gross, right?!)

    Well, feces and vomit are filled with bacteria that can cause all kinds of illnesses. So such a preference would, in the parlance of evolutionary psychology, not be very adaptive. In fact, a preference for feces and vomit would likely lead to adverse health outcomes, and across large-scale evolutionary time, any genes coding for such preferences would die a Darwinian death.

    We are the products of thousands of generations of people who were generally grossed out by the right things. That is to say that our ancestors who were grossed out by parasites, maggots, feces, and vomit were more likely to survive compared with their icky parasite-loving contemporaries, and were, thus, more likely to become our ancestors in the first place. And this is partly due to the health benefits of the behavioral immune system (which is, in short, being grossed out by stimuli that are likely to be full of pathogens and stuff that could kill you!). 

And, unsurprisingly, liberals have a lower disgust response than conservatives. Which is probably why they exhibit so many disgusting behaviors.