Official data shows it is the third most commonly used form of contraception in the UK, after the pill and the hormone implant.
A new study has found that condoms are only used by a tiny proportion of Britons.
According to a global survey of more than 29,000 people in 36 countries, only 15 percent of Britons said they had bought condoms in the past year.
And the US and Australia fared no better, at 16 and 19 percent respectively.
In comparison, countries with the highest condom purchases, such as the UAE, indicated that 63 percent of respondents had recently purchased a contraceptive.
Residents of Vietnam are also cautious, with almost half of participants living there using them.
A global survey of condom use found that residents of the Netherlands and Japan are the least likely to purchase contraception.
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But Britons, Americans and Australians are far from the most condom-averse, according to Durex research.
At the bottom of the list were Japan and the Netherlands, with only 12 percent of respondents saying they had stocked up on condoms in the past 12 months.
Condoms are the most effective method to prevent sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia, gonorrhea and herpes. In 95 percent of cases, the condom is effective.
However, research shows that when condoms are used incorrectly, their effectiveness decreases to about 79 percent.
Durex’s research found that the most common reasons for not using condoms were lack of sensation (cited by 16 percent of respondents), lack of spontaneity (14 percent) and the idea that condoms can affect mood (13 percent).
Studies of the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases worldwide seem to partly confirm these data.
Only 15 percent of the British population say they buy condoms, according to a survey of almost 30,000
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According to a 2022 international report published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, East Asia is the region with the highest prevalence of STDs since 1990. This includes Japan, where only 12 percent of people buy condoms.
The global study shows that Belgium is the country with the lowest prevalence of STDs.
In addition, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the Netherlands has the fifth highest number of annually reported cases of chlamydia of all European countries: approximately 24,000.
France, where only 16 percent of people regularly buy condoms, ranked 7th with 14,199 reported cases of chlamydia in 2022.
For comparison, Cyprus, Greece and Croatia reported 10, 59 and 100 cases respectively.
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Last year, approximately 402,000 sexually transmitted infections were diagnosed in the UK, the most common of which chlamydia (49 percent) and gonorrhea (21 percent).
About 14 percent of STIs found in Britons were genital herpes or genital warts.
Overall, the number of new diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections in the UK has decreased, but
Over the past decade, the number of new diagnoses of many STDs has declined, but the number of cases of gonorrhea and syphilis has increased.
The number of gonorrhea diagnoses in 2023 was the highest since records began in 1918, while the number of syphilis diagnoses was the highest since 1948.
Experts also worry that gonorrhea has become resistant to certain antibiotics, limiting available treatment options.