From the archives.

In between all the partying, making friends and doing a miniscule amount of work you will have to do to scrape a pass in your degree, you will also have your time taken up with a thing called “being ill”.

Once you are taken out of the sterile test tube of the family home and are exposed to the myriad health risks that university lifestyle throws up, you’re really going to have to start to look after yourself properly.

Uni is a big festering, dirty shit pit of student digs, going out every night for weeks on end, eating food that isn’t really fit for human consumption and gorging yourself on bad drugs and cheap vodka.

If you ever bother to go to your lectures, sitting in a big room with your fellow students and having germs pumped around a confined room by dirty air conditioning doesn’t help too much either. In short, going to university is going to make you ill. Here’s what you can look forward to.

STDs
With the brave new world of the first year free-for-all fanny-buffet that cheap drinks and awful pop music in the student union brings comes new danger. In theory, every one goes at it like rabbits at university, but in reality after the first few months most people end up chained up in relationships or are put off sex having caught a hefty dose. There is more chlamydia going around your average uni than in a brothel, probably because hookers get checked more often. There were 121,986 cases reported across the UK last year, an impressive 150 per cent increase since 1998. While the symptoms are hard to spot and occasionally border on non-existent you may start pissing fire and passing gross discharge. Also watch out for the American exchange students because they are the ones who are most likely to have genital warts (we don’t know the reason for this but Yank students have higher levels of genital warts than Brits. Fact). Once you get warts you have the virus for life. Treating them involves a lengthy, repetitive and painful freeze/burn combo on your genitals. There are a tonne more STDs you can get and none of them are good. The best advice is to just keep it in the bag. Read more »