Organisations for the prevention and cure of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) have been battlegrounds for social conflicts and international tensions. Debates on control of STDs expose tensions between officially condoned pro-natalism and social purity movements, and dissident internationally minded feminists, socialist sympathisers and pacifists, demanding removal of police controls on public morality, sex education, freely available contraceptives and the socialisation of health services. Medical scientists were themselves divided between these contrasting viewpoints. The emergence of any unitary international consensus on STDs let alone any single authority has been undermined by governmental hostility to a supranational agency, controversies over medical power and the efficacy and distribution of new drugs like salvarsan and penicillin, and by birth control propagandists challenging traditional notions of the family.

Imperialist conferences and conflicts

Imperialist concerns with promoting national efficiency by combating physical degeneration and declining birth rates arose at the same time that campaigners for the abolition of police controls on prostitution were seeking comprehensive strategies to prevent and treat STDs throughout the totality of populations. Voluntaristic models of self-help clashed with state and policing regulatory measures. Whether there should be targeting of specific groups like prostitutes or education of total populations (recognising that STDs were not a monopoly of prostitutes) were issues. The extent that STDs were precipitated by poverty, the lack of basic sex education or immorality was keenly debated.