Our Charity Partner - Chronic UTI Australia
At Joode our partnered Charity is Chronic UTI Australia. And here’s why:
Half of all adult women will experience at least one urinary infection in their lifetime, yet it remains misdiagnosed, mismanaged and under-researched.
As a long time (24 years and counting) sufferer of chronic UTI’s, I suffered alone and with nothing new to turn to. I don’t know why I suffer from UTI’s along with I do not know how to stop them. But I have known one thing; that when I go to the doctors and they take the dipstick test, it more often than not does not show that I have an infection. How can that be when I’ve been withering in pain for the last few hours?
UTI is the second most common human bacterial infection in the world. Half of all adult women will experience at least one UTI in their lifetime. After an initial UTI, 24% of women will go on to develop another within six months.
As a first line of diagnostics, urinary dipsticks used by GPS miss up to 70% of urinary infections. The tests are especially unsuitable for detecting embedded UTI’s which have few free floating bacteria. So why is there not a better replacement for this test?
When my UTIs flared up again in 2019, in desperation I search facebook for support and actually found a group (Chronic and Recurrent UTI Support). Not only that, I found a charity that has made it their mission to stand for people like me – Chronic UTI Australia.
I am here to support this charity to find answers. And right now the dipstick test needs to be replaced with research and a new method of diagnosing and treating UTI’s so that they don’t lead to chronic embedded UTI’s in people like you and me.
But who’s going to do it? We need more research. We need more medical professionals to become aware and change their diagnostic and treatment guidelines.
I am here to support Chronic UTI Australia in anyway I can. As a business we will donate $1 from every order. My ultimate goal is that eventually we can help fund the research to find answers.
For my daughters sake, I pledge to everyone who supports my business that I support those who suffer from UTI’s. I see a future where every single UTI suffer stops at their first UTI before they develop another and eventually become a Chronic suffer like me and so so many more.
Where does the current UTI detection method originate from?
There is a book called Cystitis Unmasked written by Emeritus Professor James Malone-Lee who explains that culture tests (the dipstick tests) became the gold standard for diagnosing UTI in the 1950s, when it was believed urine was sterile. The discovery of the urinary microbiome – varied microbes residing in everyone’s urinary track – led researchers to realise that urine cultures often provide misleading information and are incapable of distinguishing between people with or without UTI. Bizarrely, the ‘diagnostic threshold’ for identifying UTI is based on a 1950s study of 74 pregnant women with pyelonephritis (a serious kidney infection). Somehow the method used in the study became adopted worldwide to diagnose UTI in non-pregnant people.
