My questions relate to gonnorhea

1. I took 100mg doxycycline twice daily after exposure for a week. Will this have helped lower my risk.of contracting gonnorrhea

2. The risk.of transmission is estimated at roughly 5 percent from that exposure? 

3. I've had no symptoms for 8 weeks. If the doxy didn't work..would my body have cleared the infection by now?

4. How long after the episode would.inlikely be infectious? 

Thanks 

1. Doxycycline is effective against roughly half of gonorrhea strains, i.e. it reduced your risk of gonorrhea by about 50%. As Dr. Hook said last time, absence of symptoms (pus from your penis, painful urination) within 5 days of the exposure is itself strong reassurance you weren't infected.

2. Five percent is about right, but only if your partner had oral gonorrhea -- which is present in under 1% of female sex workers. So that makes the risk 0.01 x 0.05 = 0.0005 (1 chance in 2000). This risk is reduced still more by your absence of symptoms plus the doxy.

3. Not only is there nearly zero chance you were infected, but most urethral gonorrhea would have been cleared by the immune system within 8 weeks.

4. If despite all this you actually had urethral gonorrhea, you would have been infectious for other partners from the time of exposure and for roughly the next 6-8 weeks. But this didn't happen. Let it go!

HHH, MD

 Would infectiousness decline over the  8 weeks? Or would it stay the same while positive ? 

We're talking here about odds in the same ball park as your being struck by lightning someday. This shouldn't be worth another thought. You can safely assume you do not have urethral gonorrhea and never did.

Would being based in the UK alterlikehood to doxycycline working. Would the fixycycline have some positive mechanism to immune response overtime even if strain resistant? At 8 weeks roughly what percentage would clear an jnf4vtion whi have a good immune system 

There are no known differences in people's immune systems that have any effect on speed of resolution of gonorrhea, chlamydia, the frequency of herpes outbreaks, or any other STD; or for that matter, for any infections at all. It's mostly an urban myth that some people have stronger immune protection against colds, covid, tuberculosis, sepsis, HIV, or any human infection. That's not to say that all such opinions are old wives' tales, and there may be modest differences. But the most respected scientific studies (so far) haven't found much to support the notion of important differences in the "strength" of most persons immune systems. (There are occasional individual hyper-susceptibility to particular infections. This may explain rare patients with far more numerous and difficult to treat warts, for example. But these are special cases not relevant to the overall picture.)

Sorry if that's a bit more philosophical than you were expecting. For your situation, the bottom line is that gonorrhea should not be at all on your mind. It is certain you do not have symptomatic gonorrhea. Move on with no further worry about it.

That concludes this thread. I hope the discussion has been helpful.