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Babies Are Dying of Syphilis. It's 100% Preventable.
https://www.propublica.org/article/babies-are-dying-of-syphilis-its-100-preventableThe alarms are now clamoring. In the United States, more than 129,800 syphilis cases were recorded in 2019, double the case count of five years prior. In the same time period, cases of congenital syphilis quadrupled: 1,870 babies were born with the disease; 128 died. Case counts from 2020 are still being finalized, but the CDC has said that reported cases of congenital syphilis have already exceeded the prior year. Black, Hispanic and Native American babies are disproportionately at risk.
There was a time, not too long ago, when CDC officials thought they could eliminate the centuries-old scourge from the United States, for adults and babies. But the effort lost steam and cases soon crept up again. Syphilis is not an outlier. The United States goes through what former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden calls “a deadly cycle of panic and neglect” in which emergencies propel officials to scramble and throw money at a problem — whether that’s Ebola, Zika or COVID-19. Then, as fear ebbs, so does the attention and motivation to finish the task.
The last fraction of cases can be the hardest to solve, whether that’s eradicating a bug or getting vaccines into arms, yet too often, that’s exactly when political attention gets diverted to the next alarm. The result: The hardest to reach and most vulnerable populations are the ones left suffering, after everyone else looks away.
(snip)
In the latest effort, the CDC announced that the United States had “a unique opportunity to eliminate syphilis within its borders,” thanks to historically low rates, with 80% of counties reporting zero cases. The concentration of cases in the South “identifies communities in which there is a fundamental failure of public health capacity,” the agency noted, adding that elimination — which it defined as fewer than 1,000 cases a year — would “decrease one of our most glaring racial disparities in health.”
There was a time, not too long ago, when CDC officials thought they could eliminate the centuries-old scourge from the United States, for adults and babies. But the effort lost steam and cases soon crept up again. Syphilis is not an outlier. The United States goes through what former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden calls “a deadly cycle of panic and neglect” in which emergencies propel officials to scramble and throw money at a problem — whether that’s Ebola, Zika or COVID-19. Then, as fear ebbs, so does the attention and motivation to finish the task.
The last fraction of cases can be the hardest to solve, whether that’s eradicating a bug or getting vaccines into arms, yet too often, that’s exactly when political attention gets diverted to the next alarm. The result: The hardest to reach and most vulnerable populations are the ones left suffering, after everyone else looks away.
(snip)
In the latest effort, the CDC announced that the United States had “a unique opportunity to eliminate syphilis within its borders,” thanks to historically low rates, with 80% of counties reporting zero cases. The concentration of cases in the South “identifies communities in which there is a fundamental failure of public health capacity,” the agency noted, adding that elimination — which it defined as fewer than 1,000 cases a year — would “decrease one of our most glaring racial disparities in health.”