The Kissing Disease(s)

My attention was brought to the subject of kissing diseases when someone (who shall remain unnamed) complained about his mouth ulcer the other day. “This is why you don’t go around kissing people – you might end up with this,” he warned, as he showed me the underside of his bottom lip where an ugly canker sore had been living for over a week.

After the horrible realization that I could have been infected in the recent past, I did a bit of research. As it turns out, his type of ulcer is not contagious. But there are a bunch of infections out there that are contagious – herpes, mono, flu, cold, staph infections, gonorrhea, just to name a few.

Worse yet, you can’t always tell whether a person is infected. As far as I know, most people don’t check the inside of a person’s mouth before they start making out with them. And even if they did check, sometimes symptoms haven’t occurred yet, or the disease could be dormant.

Whatever the case, it’s probably better to be safe than end up with warts sprouting from your lips. Think twice before you kiss some random person at a party. If you need help, look up “mouth infections” on Google Images. That’s all I needed to be convinced.