In women STD, can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, causing lifelong pain, infertility, and ectopic pregnancy, which can kill. Children are born with blinding eye infections. Men are left infertile.
People die of advanced stages of syphilis.
Furthermore, STDs multiply the transmissibility of HIV, the AIDS virus, as much as ninefold. STDs are nearly as common as malaria more than 250 million new cases each year, at least one million of which will be HIV infection. Many health care providers lack time or equipment to diagnose STDs with laboratory tests, and many patients may not return for test results. Therefore providers often diagnose based on clinical judgment, and often they are wrong. The syndromic approach to STD patient management, which bases diagnosis on a group of symptoms and treats for all diseases that could cause that syndrome, could make diagnosis more accurate without extensive lab tests and allow treatment with a single visit.