Finally, an Answer to Why You Keep Getting UTIs After Sex

If you are a woman , the odds are fairly practiced that you have experienced the suffering and annoyance of a urinary tract transmission at some point in your life . And if you are a particularly unlucky woman , you might experience them on the regs . While women often swearsex is the culpritof a UTI read up again , as far as science is concerned , exactly why these recurring infections happen has been a mystery .

Newresearch from Washington Universitypublished this week in the journal PLOS Pathogens sheds some newfangled light on why catch jiggy with it can , in fact , ensue in recur UTIs .

In vernal , sexually active women , somewhere around 80 pct of UTIs are because of the bacteria E.coli , usually when fecal particles reach the urethra , which connects the bladder to the outside of the body . sexual activity is a pretty honest direction for E.coli to get in there in the first topographic point — to put it delicately , all that thrusting shoves a fair amount of bacteria up your hoo - ha . Common soundness has held that recur UTIs are simply have by Modern bacterium being introduced into the urinary parcel of land . But that does n’t explain some vulgar vista of recurring infection , such as the fact that every time a woman receive an infection , she becomes more likely to get one again .

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.

cultivate in mouse , Washington University researchers found that the culprit may in fact be a dissimilar bacterium : Gardnerella vaginalis . G. vaginalis is a vaginal bacterium that can cause bacterial vaginosis . Like other bacteria , sexual activity can advertize it up into the urinary piece of land . The researchers ground that while it did not cause infection forthwith , it damaged cells on the aerofoil of the bladder , allowing E.coli from a old UTI to come out of hiding and set out multiply again , leading to another infection . In some of the mouse , the bacteria traveled on to the kidneys , have damage there .

Here , behold the face of the bacteria you should blame :

The research worker noted that G. vaginalis is probably not the only cause of recurring UTIs — some of them likely are from newly - introduced E.coli . But the research suggests that when G. vaginalis shows up in a UTI laboratory psychometric test , doctors should consider whether it ’s the real source of a problem . This is key , because the antibiotics that work on stock UTIs are different from the antibiotics used to treat G. vaginalis . And at a prison term when antibiotic immune E. coli have made UTIsvirtually untreatablein some places , it points to an substitute route to dealing with these nasty infection .

William Duplessie