Syphilis rates are soaring to levels unseen in the U.S. since the 1950s, a federal government report on sexually transmitted diseases in adults revealed Tuesday.
Overall more than 2.5 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis were reported nationally in 2022 as the country’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections continues to grow.
According to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), syphilis cases alone increased 17 percent in the past year and 80 percent in the past five years to the highest count in the United States since 1950.
Meanwhile chlamydia cases held steady and reported cases of gonorrhea decreased in 2022.
“Within the STI epidemic, syphilis is one infection that stands alone,” Dr. Laura Bachmann, acting director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, cautioned in a statement. “It has emerged as a unique public health challenge.”
File/This microscope photo made available by the CDC shows a tissue sample with the presence of numerous darkly-stained, Treponema pallidum spirochetes, the bacterium responsible for causing syphilis. The U.S. syphilis epidemic continues to worsen, according to a government report released Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024. (Skip Van Orden/CDC via AP, File)
“When I was in training, I can’t recall ever seeing an obvious case of primary or secondary syphilis,” said Stanford, who leads an STI screening program but was not involved with the new CDC report. “We’re now seeing vascular complications; we’re seeing really severe surgical emergencies – things you read about in textbooks.”
The vast majority of congenital syphilis cases in the U.S. – nearly 90 percent – might have been prevented with better testing and treatment, a recent CDC report said.
The agency has emphasized the need for innovative solutions and prevention strategies to tackle the broader STI epidemic, especially in communities that are most affected.
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.
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.
“I think it’s unknowingly being spread in the cisgender heterosexual population because we really aren’t testing for it. We really aren’t looking for it” in that population, said Dr. Philip Chan, who teaches at Brown University.
Chan is also chief medical officer of Open Door Health, a health center for gay, lesbian and transgender patients in Providence, Rhode Island.