urinary-tract infections

8 Reasons It Burns When You Pee

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Time to end the misery.
graphic of a roll of toilet paper with fire emojis

Burning pee is the worst. Only a few things should be happening when you pee, and almost bursting into tears isn’t one of them. Ridding your body of waste via your urine? Sure. Wondering why all people with vaginas don’t get the luxury of peeing standing up, thus avoiding any toilet seat germs (as harmless as they may be)? Why not. But if you’re preoccupied while peeing because it feels like hellfire is raining down from your urethra, you’ve got a problem. Luckily, ob/gyns have solutions. Here, the eight most common causes of burning, painful urination, plus how to treat them.

1. You have a urinary tract infection.

This is the biggest culprit behind painful peeing, Sarah Yamaguchi, M.D., ob/gyn at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, tells SELF. A UTI happens when bacteria, often E. coli, gets into your urethra. The result: unpleasant symptoms like a persistent urge to hit up the bathroom and burning during urination. “If you’re having burning, particularly at the end of the urinary stream, it might be a sign of a urinary tract infection,” Alyssa Dweck, M.D., a gynecologist in Westchester, New York, and assistant clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, tells SELF.

If you do, in fact, have a UTI, a doctor can prescribe a round of antibiotics to kick the infection (and pain) to the curb. And if UTIs regularly besiege your poor body, make sure to take preventive measures, like staying hydrated, wiping from front to back, and peeing after you have sex.

2. You have a yeast infection.

An uncomfortable burning sensation while you pee is also a common symptom of yeast infections, which happen due to an overgrowth of yeast in the vagina, Dr. Yamaguchi explains. They’re often accompanied by another telltale symptom: “With a yeast infection, you’ll usually have thicker discharge,” one that basically looks like white cottage cheese, she explains. Antifungal medications can clear up the infection, some of which are OTC, and some of which are prescribed (but it’s smart to see a doctor just in case before grabbing an OTC medication, especially since some sexually transmitted diseases seem like regular ol’ vaginal infections).To avoid recurrent yeast infections, Dr. Yamaguchi recommends maintaining good hygiene, wearing cotton underwear for breathability (or at least underwear that has a cotton crotch), and changing ASAP after you work out instead of lounging around in your sweaty gear.

3. You have bacterial vaginosis.

Oh, bacterial vaginosis, you evil, foul-smelling wench. Yup, this infection, which arises when the “good” and “bad” bacteria in your vagina get thrown out of whack via sex, products you use, and the like, can lead to fish-scented discharge in addition to painful pee, Dr. Dweck says. Once your doctor determines that you have this infection, they’ll prescribe antibiotics for you to take either orally or vaginally.

4. You have a sexually transmitted disease.

Plenty of STDs can cause painful pee as just one of their annoying symptoms (when symptoms show up, that is—in many cases, STDs exhibit no symptoms at all). Herpes, an extremely common viral infection known for causing sores on the mouth and genitals, is one possibility, Dr. Yamaguchi says.

Chlamydia, a bacterial infection especially prevalent in women under 25, and gonorrhea, another bacterial infection that shows up a lot in that age range, are other common causes, Dr. Dweck says. Both chlamydia and gonorrhea can also lead to abnormal discharge, like some that’s yellow or green, so be on the lookout for that as well.

And trichomoniasis, the most common curable STD, can also present with terrible-smelling discharge and pain while peeing.

5. You have some sex-related vaginal tears.

The sharp, sudden pain of burning while peeing might come with a surge of panic that something is really, really wrong, but that’s not always true. “Little abrasions from sex can cause some burning while peeing and irritation,” Dr. Yamaguchi says. To cut back on that yikes-inducing feeling, she recommends pouring warm water over your vaginal area when you’re peeing. “The temperature will help interfere with the nerve pathways,” she says. And to avoid the issue altogether, she suggests making sure you’re plenty lubed up whenever your vagina’s getting some attention. Here’s everything to know before you buy some lube for sex.

6. Or some non-sex-related vaginal tears.

Many women experience burning pee after they give birth. Since all the tissue down below stretches in an impressive way to make room for the baby, vaginal and perineal tears can occur. This is why many new moms, including Chrissy Teigen, rely on perineal irrigation bottles, aka devices that make it even easier to squirt warm water on yourself to dull the pain.

7. You’re using unnecessary feminine hygiene products.

“We’ve been led to believe that the vaginal area is super dirty, and we should be cleaning with deodorizers and perfumes—that’s not the case,” Dr. Dweck says. “The vagina has a good self-cleaning protocol, if you will, to keep its pH in balance and keep things in order.” But when you use products like douches or feminine hygiene washes, you might wind up with irritation that leads to urinary burning. If your skin is super sensitive, this can even happen from fragrant bubble baths, Dr. Dweck explains.

Really, you don’t need anything beyond a gentle, fragrance-free soap and some water to wash your vulva, and you don’t even need to wash your actual vagina. Let it clean itself in peace, please!

8. You’re dealing with post-menopause atrophic vaginitis.

Hormonal changes during menopause can result in a phenomenon known as atrophic vaginitis, or vaginal atrophy, Dr. Yamaguchi says. The skin of the vulva and vagina thin out, which can lead to some burning and irritation during sex, urination, and while just going about your daily life. If you’re dealing with this, chat with your doctor to determine whether hormonal supplementation may help your symptoms, and if not, how to find relief.

Masturbation: 3 Unexpected Side Effects For Men And Women

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woman

Masturbation can have both good and bad side effects.

Masturbation is an activity few talk about but in which many partake. Despite being taboo in many parts of the world, history tells us that masturbation has been around pretty much forever, and it’s not going away anytime soon. We know the most obvious side effect of masturbation (it feels good), but few realize that the pastime can have many other side effects, both good and bad.

Stress and Pain Relief

Masturbating, like any sexual activity, releases endorphins, chemicals in our body that promote a sense of happiness and can relieve stress, Best Health Mag reported.

“In both men and women it [masturbation] provides release of stress, a time to commune with oneself (taking stock of one’s emotional state and needs), and for some even the possibility of greater self-awareness or insight,” Dr. Jordan Tishler, of inhaleMD.com, a Harvard physician who focuses on human sexuality, told Medical Daily in a recent email.

In addition, the calming effects of masturbation can also help you sleep better, and can even reduce the pain associated with menstruation and postmenopausal intercourse.

“It causes more blood flow to the pelvic region, which hastens periods and decreases pain,” Dr. Sandra LaMorgese PhD, author of Switch: Time for a Change, and an expert in sexual intimacy, told Medical Daily.“For postmenopausal women,a narrowing of the vagina can make pelvic exams and intercourse painful, but masturbation, particularly with a water-based lubricant, increases blood flow to the sex organs.”

Disease Prevention

Believe it or not, there may actually be some positive health benefits associated with masturbation, for both men and women. For example, according to LaMoregese, masturbation could help to prevent prostate cancer by allowing men to safely get rid of toxins that naturally build up in their urogenital tract.

“Men who ejaculate over five times per week decrease these toxin levels, and thereby possibly lower their risk of prostate cancer by a third,” wrote LaMoregese.

In addition, LaMorgese explained that masturbation could help to fight urinary tract infections in women by flushing out the cervix.

Pathway To Addiction?

Unfortunately, not all of the possible side effects of masturbation are necessarily good. For example, Dee Wagner, a licensed professional counselor and a board-certified dance therapist told Medical Daily that, in some cases, masturbation can serve as a chronic way to avoid intimacy with others, which in the long run can cause anxiety.

In addition, masturbation stimulates a reward response in the brain, and just as with any rewarding activity, it is possible to get addicted to the chemistry of an orgasm. Not only is this bad for your mental health, but orgasm addiction can require individuals to need more and more stimulation to get the same results, which can lead to bodily harm, Wagner explained.

CDC: Most Nosocomial Infections Fall

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Progress seen at national level, though more mixed in state-by-state analysis..

Rates of most major types of healthcare-associated infections have declined markedly in recent years, the CDC said Wednesday, although the trend did not extend to catheter-associated urinary tract infections.

In 2013, significant decreases in standardized infection rates were seen for central line-associated bloodstream infections (down 46% from 2008), surgical site infections (down 19% from 2008), hospital-onset methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections (down 8% from 2011), and hospital-onset Clostridium difficile infections (down 10% from 2011), according to the National and State Healthcare-Associated Infections Progress Report.

But catheter-associated urinary tract infections had a 6% uptick from 2009 to 2013, the report said. On the other hand, “initial data seem to indicate that these infections have started to decrease.”

Data for the report came from the CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network, which collects information from some 14,500 hospitals and other facilities.

In addition to the national summary, the report also included state-by-state data (including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) on the major classes of healthcare-associated infection, for which the picture was more mixed.

Some states saw massive increases in certain types of infection — a 42% increase in rates of MRSA bacteremia in Alabama, for example — while others showed dramatic declines, such as Louisiana’s decrease of 37% in C. difficile.

FDA OKs New Infection Drugs

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Antibacterial and anti-flu products add to weapons against disease.

A new antibacterial drug and an anti-influenza medication got the nod from the FDA.

The agency approved the combination of ceftolozane, a cephalosporin antibacterial drug, and tazobactam, a beta-lactamase inhibitor, which will be sold as Zerbaxa and used to treat complicated intra-abdominal infections and complicated urinary tract infections.

And it also approved peramivir (Rapivab), an anti-influenza drug delivered by intravenous injection and intended for patients unable to take medication orally or by inhalation.

The approval of ceftolozane/tazobactam is an important milestone, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), which has been pushing for the development of 10 new systemic antibacterial drugs by 2020.

That campaign — dubbed the 10 x ’20 Initiative — began in 2010, so this approval comes at the halfway mark, the society noted in a statement.

It’s also the fifth new drug since the campaign was launched and the first to address “certain serious and resistant Gram-negative bacteria,” the IDSA statement said.

Zerbaxa’s OK comes in a busy year for antibiotic development. The FDA this year has already approved dalbavancin (Dalvance), tedizolid (Sivextro), and oritavancin (Orbactiv).

The other new antibacterial is ceftaroline fosamil (Teflaro), approved late in 2010.

“The FDA approval of several new antibacterial drugs this year demonstrates the agency’s commitment to increasing the availability of treatment options for patients and physicians,” according to Edward Cox, MD, of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

“We must continue to help foster the development of new antibacterial drugs and encourage prudent use of existing treatments to conserve their utility,” Cox said in a statement.

On the other hand, the fight is not over, the IDSA said.

“Even this important approval doesn’t address all of our antibiotic needs,” the society statement said. “Patients still face life-threatening infections for which additional new antibiotics are urgently needed.”

Ceftolozane/tazobactam got approval as a qualified infectious disease product under the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now (GAIN) title of the FDA Safety and Innovation Act as “an antibacterial or antifungal human drug intended to treat a serious or life-threatening infection,” the agency said in a statement.

The combination’s efficacy in complicated intra-abdominal infections (in combination with metronidazole) was established in a clinical trial with 979 adults, randomly assigned to receive the combination plus metronidazole or meropenem.

Efficacy in complicated urinary tract infections was established in a clinical trial where 1,068 adults were randomly assigned to receive the combination or levofloxacin (Levaquin).

The drug’s label notes that efficacy was observed to be lower in patients with renal impairment. The most common side effects in clinical trials were nausea, diarrhea, headache, and fever.

Meanwhile, the agency has also approved peramivir, according to the drug’s maker, BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, of Research Triangle Park, N.C.

The drug is a neuraminidase inhibitor, like oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza), but given as a single-dose IV shot. Oseltamivir is an oral medication, while zanamivir is inhaled.

Peramivir is intended to be used by adult patients who have uncomplicated flu, but can’t take oral or inhaled drugs. The approved indication specifies that patients must have been symptomatic for no more than 2 days.

Copper bed rails kill hospital-related infections on contact

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  • Copper is a bacterium’s worst nightmare, so researchers are coating hospital bed rails in it to curb the hundreds of millions of cases of healthcare-acquired infections around the world.
  • You know what’s not cool? Checking yourself into hospital for one illness, only to contract another illness purely by virtue of the fact that you’re currently in a hospital. That’s bad news for everyone, because you have to stay in hospital for longer, which means more cost for hospital to keep you there and treat you.

    But new research has come up with a way to curb all the gross infections spread in hospital wards – copper bed rails. Because, apparently, copper kills everything.

    According to the US Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, one in 25 hospital patients are affected by hospital-related infections, such as pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and it costs $40 billion a year to treat them.

  • For developing countries, that rate is even higher. In Australia, there are reportedly around 200,000 cases in hospitals every year. Sometimes people die from these infections.

    Eighty percent of these infections are spread because of surface contact in hospitals, and the biggest offender is the bed safety railing, touched by all manner of staff and patients throughout the day. Calling them “the most contaminated surface”in the room, researcher Constanza Correa from a Chile-based start-up called Copper BioHealth has installed 150 copper bed rails in four hospitals around the country to see if they can curb the rate of infection.

    It sounds odd, but copper is actually a known microbe killer. In fact, according to Hannah Bloch at NPR, people have known about its antimicrobial properties since at least 2,600-2,000 BC, when an ancient Egyptian medical text was written about how it could be used to sterilise wounds and treat water. “Bacteria, yeasts and viruses are rapidly killed on metallic copper surfaces, and the term ‘contact killing’ has been coined for this process,” Correa and her team report in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. 

    Talking to Goats and Soda, Correa says these copper railings cost between $60 to $100 per bed per month, which seems pretty steep, but she says by reducing the cost of infection treatment, they’ll have paid for themselves within three years.

    While the results of Correa’s copper bedrail experiment are yet to be published,Bloch points to another study that was published by US researchers last year. Reporting in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the team led by Cassandra D. Salgado from the Medical University of South Carolina in the US reported that the presence of copper bed rails “reduced the number of healthcare-acquired infections from 8.1 percent in regular rooms to 3.4 percent in the copper rooms”.

    It’s not entirely clear why copper, as Correa puts it, “kills everything”. It’s been suggested that the process occurs in two stages – firstly as soon as a single-cell bacterium comes into contact with a copper surface, the interaction causes its outer membrane to rupture and become full of holes.

    According to the International Copper Association (ICA), this occurs because this outer membrane is maintained by a “stable electrical micro current”, also known as a transmembrane potential, which causes a voltage difference between the inside and outside of the bacterium. “It is strongly suspected that when a bacterium comes in contact with a copper surface, a short circuiting of the current in the cell membrane can occur,” says the ICA. “This weakens the membrane and creates holes.”

    The other option is that copper molecules can actual cause ‘rust’ to occur in the cell membrane.

    Now that the bacterium’s outer membrane is full of holes, we arrive at the second deadly stage – copper ions start rushing into the single-cell bacterium, overwhelming it and grinding its metabolic activity to a halt. “The bacterium can no longer ‘breathe’, ‘eat’, ‘digest’ or ‘create energy’,” says the ICA, and so it dies.

    Correa says if their experiment proves a success, she’ll push for copper surfaces elsewhere in hospitals, such as on bedside tables, IV poles, and mattress covers.

    Sources: NPR, International Copper Association

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Bacteremia Appears to Increase 30-Day Risk of MI or Stroke.

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Patients who had bacteremia —mainly urinary-tract infections, pneumonia, or sepsis —when admitted to hospital were much more likely to have an MI or stroke within 30 days, compared with healthy controls or patients hospitalized for other reasons, in a new study [1] .

“Our study corroborates that acute infection may trigger cardiovascular events,” Dr Michael Dalager-Pedersen (Aalborg University Hospital, Denmark) told heart wire in an email. “It is the first study to demonstrate that many different bacterial infections may affect MI and stroke risk,” he added.

The research suggests that “bacteremia (a severe and acute infection) should be considered a risk factor for MI and stroke, but only for a short period of time after onset of infection,” and it hints that infection with Staphylococcus aureus may confer a particularly high risk.

“Patients admitted with signs of acute infection and bacteremia/sepsis should be monitored closely for complications, and treated early . . . with fluid therapy, oxygen, and antibiotics,” Dalager-Pedersen continued. “Moreover, it seems prudent to increase vaccination efforts (eg, influenza and pneumococcal vaccination), in particular in patients who already have established cardiovascular disease, since infection may trigger new cardiovascular events.”

Future studies are needed to clarify whether specific cardiovascular therapies (eg, antithrombotic or anti-inflammatory drugs) may reduce the risk of cardiovascular complications in patients with bacteremia, he said.

The study was published online February 12, 2014 in Circulation.

Infection a Trigger for MI, Stroke

An estimated one million Americans have an acute MI or stroke each year, and it would be useful to understand how acute infections might trigger these events, but most previous studies lacked laboratory confirmation of infection, the researchers write.

Using population-based databases, they identified 4389 patients in Northern Denmark who had positive blood cultures when admitted to hospital from 1992 to 2010. The pathogens were Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, S aureus, other bacteria, and fungi. Most patients had urinary-tract infections or pneumonia, while others had central nervous system infections, endocarditis, and other infections.

The mean age of patients was 73 years. Based on age, gender, and date of admission, each patient was matched with about five patients hospitalized for other reasons and about 10 individuals in the general population.

Researchers identified all incident MI and stroke events that occurred within 0 to 30 days, 31 to 180 days, and 181 to 365 days after the day of hospitalization.

Patients with community-acquired bacteremia had a greatly increased risk of MI or stroke within 30 days. At 31 to 180 days, these patients had a modestly higher risk of MI or stroke compared with healthy controls, but not compared with other hospitalized patients. No differences in cardiovascular risk were seen after more than six months.