increasingly affecting newborns, too<\/a>, CDC officials said.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTotal cases surpassed 207,000 in 2022, a 17% increase and the highest count in the United States since 1950, according to data released Tuesday. The count includes not only the most infectious stages of the disease but also latent cases and cases in which pregnant women passed syphilis on to their babies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Syphilis is a bacterial disease that can surface as painless genital sores but can ultimately lead to paralysis, hearing loss, dementia and even death if left untreated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
New syphilis infections plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when antibiotics became widely available and fell to their lowest by 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About 59,000 of the 2022 cases involved the most infectious forms of syphilis. Of those, about a quarter were women and nearly a quarter were heterosexual men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s unknowingly being spread in the cisgender heterosexual population because we really aren\u2019t testing for it. We really aren\u2019t looking for it\u201d in that population, said Dr. Philip Chan, who teaches at Brown University and is chief medical officer of Open Door Health, a health center for gay, lesbian and transgender patients in Providence, Rhode Island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The report also shows rates of the most infectious types of syphilis rose not just across the country but also across different racial and ethnic groups, with American Indian and Alaska Native people having the highest rate. South Dakota outpaced any other state for the highest rate of infectious syphilis at 84 cases per 100,000 people \u2014 more than twice as high as the state with the second-highest rate, New Mexico.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
South Dakota\u2019s increase was driven by an outbreak in the Native American community, said Dr. Meghan O\u2019Connell, chief public health officer at the Great Plains Tribal Leaders\u2019 Health Board based in Rapid City, South Dakota. Nearly all of the cases were in heterosexual people, and O\u2019Connell said that STD testing and treatment was already limited in isolated tribal communities and only got worse during the pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last year convened a syphilis task force focused on stopping the spread of the STD, with an emphasis on places with the highest syphilis rates \u2014 South Dakota, 12 other states and the District of Columbia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The report also looked at the more common STDs of chlamydia and gonorrhea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chlamydia cases were relatively flat from 2021 to 2022, staying at a rate of about 495 per 100,000, though there were declines noted in men and especially women in their early 20s. For gonorrhea, the most pronounced decline was seen in women in their early 20s as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Experts say they\u2019re not sure why gonorrhea rates declined. It happened in about 40 states, so whatever explains the decrease appears to have occurred across most of the country. STD testing was disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and officials believe that\u2019s the reason the chlamydia rate fell in 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s possible that testing and diagnoses were still shaking out in 2022, said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of the CDC\u2019s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are encouraged by the magnitude of the decline,\u201d Mermin said, though the gonorrhea rate is still higher now than it was pre-pandemic. \u201cWe need to examine what happened, and whether it\u2019s going to continue to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
apnews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 The U.S. syphilis epidemic isn\u2019t abating, with the rate of infectious cases rising 9% in 2022, according to a new federal government report on sexually transmitted diseases in adults. But there\u2019s some unexpected good news: The rate of new gonorrhea cases fell for the first time in a decade. It\u2019s not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":23420,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5784],"tags":[26362,26361],"class_list":["post-23419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health","tag-in-1950","tag-syphilis-appeared-in-the-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23421,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23419\/revisions\/23421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}