What is a Yeast Infection? Why a Yeast Infection Blog?

Yeast infections are generally infections caused by a certain type of fungi. Fungi (fungus for singular) are microorganisms which are generally saprofits and can be found almost everywhere (I guess only space is fungi free zone): in your home, outside, even in your body.

Most frequent yeast infection is a vaginal yeast infection. It is already proven that 75% of women will experience at least one episode of vaginal yeast infection during their life and a half of that women will suffer from a recurrent yeast infection. Recurrent means that it will be present in your vagina for at least 3 times per year. That is exactly the reason why I decided to start this blog: a lot of women ask me about vaginal yeast infection and it is a lot easier to send them to read instead of answering the same question over and over again.

Vaginal yeast infections can be nasty and annoying, but they are not life threatening (mostly, a yeast infection can be a threat at one point), that is why most of women will not follow a serious treatment, but will run to the local pharmacy, will buy some OTC (or prescribed drug) remedy and will use it. The point is that most of them (approx 80%) will not even know is it a yeast infection or not.

Simple and easy-to-understand information about prevention and alternative treatment for yeast infections is pretty hard to find even in today’s extremely large internet, partially because it is a low profit industry (as for example an Ad sense click for "yeast" will cost you only around 50 cents, while a "mesothelioma" click will cost up to 6$), partially because men don’t suffer from yeast infection (they do get Candida, but have no vagina to make a vaginal yeast infection). Here is exactly the gap I want to fill: give more information on this very specific issue to help women to understand how to prevent, avoid and treat this extremely unpleasant infection.

The problem which I see as a threat is called resistance. Nope, it is not only the name for French revolution; it is also a name for a phenomenon which happens to various drugs, especially antibiotics and antifungals.

In early 2000’s the regulation regarding antifungals changed and some of creams and suppositories became OTC (over the counter) drugs. That means you don’t need anymore any prescription to buy this drug from a pharmacy.

At that very moment marketing agencies working for pharmaceutical companies began to work even harder and now every woman assumes that any itch in vagina is yeast related. And buys an OTC product to cure that vaginal yeast infection.

Now let’s go back in time and remember times (well most of us will not) when the simple penicillin was the best (and the only) antibiotic. It was suitable for almost any infection. It was a miracle cure. But than it got widely used, people stopped finishing their prescriptions; even farmers began to feed animals with penicillin. What do we have now? An antibiotic that can’t kill a thing, most of bacteria became resistant to penicillin.

So can happen to antifungals. When you use a powerful antifungal to treat your vaginal yeast infection, only resistant yeasts remain in your vagina. And next time an overgrowth will happen it will be a resistant stain of Candida. (By the way, some studies already show that up to 20% of Candida is resistant to antifungals used today as OTC). And if we will not limit the use of synthetic antifungals to the cases we are positive it is a yeast infection, in 10-20 years we will be in the same situation with Candida resistance as we are now with bacterial resistance. All said above is not referring to immune compromised women, which need a different approach, and develop yeast infection more frequent.

Netx time I’ll tell you about yeast infection causes.