syphilis
lborkowski | August 28, 2017Last week’s New York Times featured a great article on a syphilis outbreak in Oklahoma. Reporter Jan Hoffman documented some of the impressive work state health investigators are doing to contain the outbreak, from using Facebook to discern likely transmission routes to showing up at the homes of people with positive test results and offering them rides to treatment centers.
CDC warned earlier this year that syphilis rates are on the rise throughout the US. Primary and secondary syphilis, the disease’s most infectious stages, rose 19% in a single year (2014-2015), and that trend appears to be…
kkrisberg | October 20, 2016In troubling public health news, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported just yesterday that combined cases of gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia in the U.S. have climbed to the highest number on record.
With the release of its “Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2015” report, the agency documented more than 1.5 million cases of chlamydia, nearly 400,000 cases of gonorrhea and about 24,000 cases of primary and secondary syphilis. Syphilis clocked the largest increase from 2014 to 2015 at 19 percent, gonorrhea increased by nearly 13 percent and chlamydia rose by nearly 6…
kkrisberg | November 17, 2015For the first time since 2006, cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis are on the rise, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency reports that while the sexually transmitted diseases continue to impact young people and women most severely, the recent increases were driven by rising disease rates among men.
Released just today as part of CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2014 report, the data finds that chlamydia cases are up 2.8 percent since 2013; primary and secondary syphilis (the most infectious stages of the disease) are up 15.…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
palmd | April 25, 2009I used to teach at a hospital downtown. While on rounds, I'd often ask my residents and students where they were born, and get answers such as, "Alabama", "Kerala, India", "Damascus, Syria". Inevitably, they'd ask me where I was born, and I'd point to the floor and say, "Right here".
"You mean in Michigan?"
"No," I'd explain, "I mean right here in this hospital."
So I have a certain pride about my hometown. I like Detroit, and although I, like many others born there, don't live in the city, I always hope for a recovery. So it saddens me whenever I see news stories that paint my natal…
palmd | January 21, 2009Jake over at Pure Pedantry has a post up about eCards used to warn of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and while the idea is certainly humorous, it's probably a really good idea. The story has popped up a few times in the last several months, most recently in the New York Times. The basic idea is this: you hook up with someone, find out you have and STI, and then email them anonymously through a third party service to let them know they've been exposed and need to get checked out. These third party services usually provide health care links as well.
Anonymous internet hook-ups…