A positive gonorrhoea, chlamydia, or syphilis result is routine and curable. The thing to understand in Georgia is a handover: the free community service or private lab that flagged your result usually does not treat you — treatment happens at a clinic. Because the free checkpoints focus on HIV, syphilis and hepatitis, and the bacterial swabs come from a private lab, you often need to take a positive result to a doctor yourself. Here's the pathway for each infection. For the biology, use the general STI diagnosis guides linked at the foot of this page.

🔀 The Handover: From Testing to Treatment

  • Reactive syphilis at a free checkpoint (AHF, Equality Movement, Tanadgoma, AIDS Center): they give you the result and route you to treatment. Syphilis confirmation and treatment sit with the AIDS Center or a dermatovenereology service.
  • Positive gonorrhoea/chlamydia from a private lab (e.g. Synevo): the lab reports the result but does not treat you. You take it to a clinician — the AIDS Center, a dermatovenereology clinic, or a doctor linked to the community programme — for the prescription or injection.

Treatment itself is usually a modest self-pay cost at a private clinic; ask the community NGO for a low-cost, gay-friendly referral rather than picking a clinic blind.

💊 Treatment by Infection

Chlamydia

Oral antibiotics — a course of doxycycline or azithromycin. Straightforward, handled at a clinic. If your positive came from a throat or rectal swab, make sure that is the site being treated.

Gonorrhoea

Because of antibiotic resistance, gonorrhoea is treated with an injection of ceftriaxone — oral options are avoided. You get this at a clinic, not over a pharmacy counter. Again, confirm the clinic is covering the throat or rectum if that is where you tested positive, not just assuming a genital infection.

Syphilis

A reactive syphilis blood test usually needs a confirmatory blood draw to tell an active infection from antibodies left by a past, treated one. If it is active, treatment is a long-acting benzathine penicillin injection, with the number of doses depending on the stage.

Get every site treated. Gonorrhoea and chlamydia sit silently in the throat and rectum, so if you were only swabbed at one site, arrange three-site testing before you consider yourself clear — the testing guide below covers where.

📣 Telling Partners

Georgia runs no clinic-managed anonymous partner-notification service for STIs — no health adviser will contact your partners for you. Partner notification is patient-led: you tell recent partners yourself so they can test and treat. It is on you, but it is also what stops the infection bouncing straight back to you after treatment.

Two ways to handle it:

  1. Directly — message or call recent partners and tell them to get a full screen.
  2. Anonymously, through your own channels — if a direct conversation isn't safe or comfortable, send an anonymous heads-up yourself. The general partner-notification guide below has scripts and anonymous methods.

Re-testing after treatment matters — a test of cure for gonorrhoea, and follow-up bloods for syphilis to confirm it is clearing. Ask the clinic when to come back before you leave.

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