Pubic hair grooming practices in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: prevalence, side effects and association with sexually transmitted infections
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pubic hair grooming is common in many countries, but little is known about this practice in Africa. Grooming has been positively associated with self-reported sexually transmitted infections (STIs). This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and safety of pubic hair grooming in two South African settings. In KwaZulu-Natal province, 1218 women participating in the Evidence for Contraceptive Options and HIV Outcomes Trial completed an interviewer-administered questionnaire on pubic hair grooming practices, and were tested for Chlamydia trachomatis (CT), Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) and herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2). Pubic hair removal was reported by 705 (58.2%) of women. Common areas for grooming were the pubis (n = 616, 99.4%), vagina/perineum (n = 529, 85.3%) and inner thigh (n = 255, 41.1%). Half (n= 361, 51.4%) removed some or all of their pubic hair at least monthly and 59 (8.4%) once a week or more often. Common side effects reported included itching (n = 439, 77.1%) and pimples and blisters (n = 249, 43.9%). A quarter (n = 173, 24.5%) of groomers had a positive result for either or both of CT and NG compared to a fifth (n = 98, 19.4%) of non-groomers (p-value < 0.033). There was no difference between the groups for HSV-2. After adjusting for age and having more than one sex partner, groomers were significantly more likely to have CT or NG than non-groomers (OR: 1.31; 95% CI: 1.19–1.45). Similarly, those who experienced hair removal-related complications had 1.26 times the odds of testing positive for CT or NG (95% CI: 1.03–1.54). The practice of pubic hair removal is common and reporting of side effects is high in this population. These injuries could put women at a higher risk of STIs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".