Syphilis Cases Soar Among Gay and Bisexual Men
I Love Lucy was kicking off its first season, super glue had just been invented, and there were 140,000 syphilis cases reported across the country.”By 2000, however, decades of public health advocacy and medical advancements, such as the use of antibiotics in early treatment, had cut down cases to just 32,000 per year.So, what happened?
Why are the numbers worse now than they were 24 years ago?“In the United States, syphilis was close to elimination in the 1990s, so we know it’s possible to reverse this epidemic,” Dr.
Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, stated.The CDC recently released its STI surveillance report for 2022, the most recent verified data set available.
With it, we looked at what might be responsible for the uptick, and the groups of people most impacted today.Men account for the most cases of syphilis, with the vast majority of those cases occurring among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, according to the CDC.The agency reports that these men are “disproportionally impacted by STIs, including gonorrhea and [primary and secondary syphilis], and co-infection with HIV is common; in 2022, 36.4% of MSM with P&S syphilis were persons with diagnosed HIV.” The CDC noted that the disparity is less likely caused by sexual behavior and more by access to quality sexual health care.Known widely as “The Great Pretender” in medical circles, syphilis earned the moniker by its difficulty to detect in early stages.
