If untreated, men may get fevers, chills and swelling of the genitals and prostate Can affect fertility in men and women. 2002: 24,953 cases – a 9 per cent increase since 2001SYPHILIS: Starts with a single sore, usually painless. Can lead to organ damage, paralysis, blindness, dementia and death. 2002: 1,193 cases – an 870 per cent increase since 1996GENITAL WARTS: Small, flat or cauliflower-shaped, flesh-coloured bumps Can lead to cervical cancer and cancer of the penis. Condoms will not always prevent infection – the only sure way to avoid them is to avoid sex.

2002: 69,417 cases – a 17 per cent increase since 1996Adam Vulliamy. The first thing you notice about Antonio Banderas is his eyes. Unfeasibly large and soft, they seem to travel into the room before him, leading a surprisingly slight frame in their wake. When transfixed by their gaze one can understand why it was once said of Banderas that half the world wants to be him and the other half wants to sleep with him. His character, an animated hitman hired to rub out Shrek, is laid low by an attack of hairballs and, after being spared by his intended victim, wields his cutlass in the service of the amiable ogre instead. Puss steals the movie with a mickey-take of Banderas’s heroic swordplay in The Mask of Zorro; and when the actor enters the suite at the Dorchester Hotel for our interview, the inspiration for the winsome, beseeching kitty look which Puss affects in the film is obvious.Banderas, of course, doesn’t actually appear himself.

It was not his fabled good looks that won him the part, but his voice. He has come a long way since he first arrived in America from Spain in 1992; at that time his command of English was almost non-existent “My English wasn’t. It just wasn’t,” he agrees, lighting up a cigarette and stretching his casually dressed limbs across an overstuffed sofa. “It was a shocking thing, actually.”Approached by an agent in Los Angeles when Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was nominated for an Oscar, Banderas then went to London to meet Arne Glimcher, the director of The Mambo Kings “I came speaking not a word of English. I learnt two lines – ‘of course, of course, of course’ and ‘I can do that’ And the second one worked.