40 Fun Facts About Sexual Health

A contraceptive recipe in an Egyptian papyrus from about 1850 BC called for the dung of which animal?

Crocodile dung was shaped into a pessary in the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus, which also suggests acacia gum, an ingredient later shown to have real sperm-killing properties.

Which marsupial faces its own chlamydia epidemic, an infection that can attack its eyes and urinary tract?

Koala hospital records kept over 30 years show chlamydia was the most common reason for admission after injuries.

The hormones in the first birth control pills were made from a wild Mexican variety of which root vegetable?

Yam roots from the rain forests of Veracruz gave chemist Russell Marker a cheap source of progesterone, and steroid prices plummeted once the trade took off.

Which condom brand was launched in 1929 by the London Rubber Company?

Durex is short for durability, reliability and excellence, a name the London Rubber Company coined three years before it began making condoms under its own brand.

Which British royal held hands with an AIDS patient in 1987, challenging fears that touch could spread the illness?

Princess Diana was the first British royal to make physical contact with AIDS patients, and she later opened a home for young patients in Washington, DC.

Which 4-foot-7 sex therapist, host of the radio show Sexually Speaking, had trained as a sniper as a teenager?

Ruth Westheimer joined the Haganah at 17 and learned to assemble a rifle in the dark, decades before America knew her as Dr. Ruth.

Which hormone, also called the 'cuddle hormone', is nicknamed the 'love hormone' for its role in social bonding?

Oxytocin also drives the contractions of labour, and its name comes from ancient words meaning 'swift childbirth'.

After a 1495 outbreak in Naples, syphilis was named after which country, whose troops were blamed for spreading it?

France returned the insult by calling it the Neapolitan disease, while the Russians blamed the Poles and the Dutch blamed the Spanish.

Which human cell, one of the largest in the body, is just visible to the naked eye without a microscope?

An egg can be seen without a lens, yet nobody identified one in a mammal until Karl Ernst von Baer did in 1827.

Genetic evidence suggests human ancestors caught pubic lice more than three million years ago from which other primates?

Gorillas carry the closest relative of the human pubic louse, and early humans may have picked it up by sleeping in nests the apes had left.

Which Los Angeles Lakers star retired abruptly in 1991 after announcing that he had contracted HIV?

Magic Johnson came back for the 1992 All-Star Game, where he was named MVP, and went on to campaign for HIV prevention and safe sex.

Which toxic metal, rubbed on the skin or inhaled as vapour, was a standard syphilis treatment for centuries?

Mercury was sometimes vaporized over a fire while the patient sat shut inside a box with only the head left outside.

Syphilis is named after the hero of a 1530 Latin poem by Girolamo Fracastoro, a character with which occupation?

A shepherd named Syphilus is the poem's protagonist, and his name may itself be borrowed from a character in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Which Chicago gangster showed signs of syphilis attacking his brain soon after he was sent to federal prison?

Al Capone is thought to have caught the infection years earlier, while working as a bouncer in a brothel at the start of his criminal career.

Which antibiotic, introduced against syphilis in 1943, turned a feared lifelong infection into one cured by injection?

Penicillin sent syphilis rates tumbling in the 1940s, and a single injection of it is still the first-line treatment for an early infection.

Tom Hanks won a Best Actor Oscar for playing a lawyer fired for having AIDS in which 1993 film?

Philadelphia was filmed on location in its namesake city, and Bruce Springsteen's title song for it won an Oscar as well.

Which annual campaign has men grow moustaches for a month to raise funds for testicular cancer and other health causes?

Movember joins 'mo', a slang word for a moustache, to the name of the month it runs in, and its foundation has staged the event since 2004.

Which gland, about the size of a walnut, sits just below a man's bladder and surrounds the urethra?

The prostate makes part of the fluid in semen, and the alkalinity of semen helps sperm survive longer in the acidic vaginal tract.

Which American inventor's 1844 patent for vulcanized rubber led to the first rubber condoms eleven years later?

Charles Goodyear is said to have hit on the process in 1839, when a mix of rubber and sulfur he accidentally heated hardened instead of melting.

World AIDS Day, observed around the globe every year since 1988, falls on the first day of which month?

December 1 was suggested by a former TV journalist, who reckoned news coverage would be greatest between the US elections and Christmas.

Which 18th-century Venetian adventurer wrote of using 'assurance caps' to avoid fathering children with his lovers?

Giacomo Casanova is among the first people on record using condoms to prevent pregnancy, and an old illustration shows him inflating one to check it for holes.

Which virus, best known for causing cold sores around the mouth, can also be passed on as a genital infection?

Herpes simplex sores were so widespread in ancient Rome that Emperor Tiberius is said to have banned kissing for a time.

Which STI, which can also infect the throat without causing symptoms, is colloquially known as 'the clap'?

Gonorrhea in the throat produces no symptoms in about 90% of cases, so many people who carry it there never find out.

Trichomoniasis, an STI that causes no symptoms in about 70% of people, is caused by which kind of organism?

A parasite called Trichomonas vaginalis is behind it, a single-celled protozoan that feeds on fragments of the cells it damages.

The pandemic strain of HIV is closely related to a virus found in which primates of Central African forests?

Chimpanzees in countries such as Cameroon and Gabon carry it, and one theory holds that a hunter was infected while butchering an animal.

Which Hollywood star helped found the AIDS research charity amfAR in 1985 and served as its founding national chairman?

Elizabeth Taylor launched the effort with a $250,000 contribution from actor Rock Hudson, made shortly before his death from AIDS in October 1985.

Which childhood infection, known for swollen cheeks, can also inflame the testicles and occasionally reduce fertility?

Mumps inflames the testes more often than any other part of the body outside the salivary glands, though lasting sterility is rare.

A US study that left hundreds of Black men untreated for syphilis from 1932 to 1972 is named after which Alabama city?

Tuskegee's study ran for 40 years, and its exposure led to the Belmont Report and to laws requiring review boards to protect people who take part in research.

Research behind the HPV vaccine Gardasil began in 1991 with Jian Zhou and Ian Frazer at a university in which country?

Australia's University of Queensland was one of four institutions, the other three American, that went on to develop the vaccine in parallel.

The Pap smear, a screening test for cervical cancer, takes its name from a doctor born in which country?

Greece-born Georgios Papanikolaou relied on his wife Andromachi, who served as both his laboratory assistant and his research subject.

Which Indiana University biologist studied gall wasps before publishing famous reports on human sexual behavior?

Alfred Kinsey took 26 detailed measurements of hundreds of thousands of the insects before he turned the same appetite for data on people.

Salvarsan, which in 1910 became the first effective drug for syphilis, was a compound built around which toxic element?

Arsenic compounds were tested by the hundred in Paul Ehrlich's laboratory, and the winner was nicknamed 606 for its place in the series.

Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi won a 2008 Nobel Prize for discovering HIV at which Paris research centre?

The Pasteur Institute team found the virus in a lymph node sample in 1983 and first called it LAV, before anyone was sure it caused AIDS.

Timothy Ray Brown, the first person considered cured of HIV, was known to the world by the name of which city?

Berlin was where doctors gave him a stem cell transplant for leukemia in 2007, and the nickname was coined to keep his identity private.

Which plant, shown on ancient Cyrene's coins and perhaps used as a contraceptive, was reported extinct in Roman times?

Silphium was so vital to Cyrene's economy that most of the city's coins carried its image, and it is believed to have been a relative of giant fennel.

The drug that became Viagra, designed to treat angina, had its first clinical trials at a hospital in which country?

Wales hosted the trials in Swansea, where the drug did little for angina but produced the side effect that changed Pfizer's plans for it.

Which fossil-plant scientist and author of the 1918 manual Married Love co-founded Britain's first birth control clinic?

Marie Stopes was also an expert on coal and the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester.

Which country calls condoms 'mechais', after the politician who founded its restaurant chain Cabbages and Condoms?

Thailand's Mechai Viravaidya also staged condom-blowing contests for schoolchildren and had taxi drivers hand condoms out to their passengers.

Which pill, approved in the United States for HIV prevention in 2012, was the first form of PrEP?

Truvada combines two antiviral drugs in a single tablet, and a successor called Descovy was approved for the same purpose in 2019.

A 1965 Supreme Court ruling struck down which state's law banning even married couples from using contraceptives?

Connecticut police arrested the two people running a New Haven birth control clinic, who were fined $100 each before the case went to Washington.