TOPEKA — Kansas is one of two states that doesn’t allow expedited partner therapy for sexually transmitted disease, a practice that allows medical providers to prescribe treatment to an infected patient’s partner without requiring them to come in for an exam.
Patrick Allen, a doctor and medical school professor in Wichita, said expedited partner therapy would prevent reinfection, which can be a painful — and even life-threatening — experience. An STD, and especially reinfection, carries particularly serious risks for pregnant people.
Allen said within the past month he saw a patient who had a sexually transmitted infection while pregnant. An STI is the infection, and an STD refers to the disease the infection causes. Allen advised her and her partner to take antibiotics as treatment, but that didn’t happen. A week later, she returned to the hospital — her baby had not survived.
“Expedited partner therapy will not be a silver bullet, it will not solve all these problems, but it is a tool that we physicians need in order to prevent these devastating outcomes,” Allen testified Thursday before the House Health and Human Services Committee. “EPT works. It’s safe. We have 48 case studies ahead of us to reassure against any unintended consequences.”
Senate Bill 448 would allow medical providers to prescribe treatment to a patient’s partner without seeing the partner if they are “unlikely or unable to present for examination, testing and treatment.” The patient would receive counseling from the provider, and give their partner information about the treatment and possible side effects.
If the partner experiences an adverse side effect, the provider wouldn’t be liable.
Garden City Republican Sen. Bill Clifford, an ophthalmologist, and Coffeyville Republican Rep. Ron Bryce, a physician, both admitted they prescribe expedited partner therapy without the law in place.
“I’ll share a prison cell with Sen. Clifford. I’ve also done this,” Bryce said. “But one of the things I‘ve always worried about whenever I surreptitiously did expedited therapy was I don’t meet the patient I’m treating, I don’t know their medical record, I don’t know their allergies.”
