By Matt Simonette

Staff writer

The U.S. syphilis rate climbed for the seventh consecutive year, according to data released last week at the 2008 National STD Prevention Conference held at the Chicago Hilton and Towers.

The number of new cases is relatively low—11,181 in 2007—but the increasing numbers worry public health officials. The 2007 figures represent a 12-percent jump from 2006. About 64 percent of those new cases are gay men.

“The resurgence of syphilis among men who have sex with men since 2000 represents a formidable challenge to our STD prevention efforts, but one that can be overcome,’’ said the CDC’s Dr. Kevin Fenton March 12.

The syphilis rate among men increased 14 percent in 2007, said Dr. Hillard Weinstock of the CDC.

While syphilis is easily treated with an injection if it is detected early, he added, the disease can result in devastating illness if left untreated. It also can increase the likelihood of HIV infection two- to five-fold, according to Weinstock.

Gay men represented just 5 percent of syphilis infections back in 1999. CDC officials suggested that the infection rate had become so low that prevention efforts and community vigilance began to wane.

Gay men are not the only community seeing escalating rates in syphilis infection, according to Weinstock.

“Ongoing increases in women and African-Americans are also troubling,” he said, citing infection rate increases of 10 percent and 22 percent, respectively, in those populations.

CDC Dr. John Douglas said, “While STD screening is by no means the only weapon...it is certainly one of our best tools for ensuring prompt diagnosis and treatment and slowing the transmission of these diseases.”

He said that CDC research had suggested that STD screening rates remain too low and that gay men especially could benefit from more thorough screenings. More than one-third of rectal gonorrhea infections, for example, and a quarter of gonorrhea infections of the throat go undetected in gay men due to inadequate screening rates.

Douglas also added that a study out of the University of California-San Francisco suggested that a test approved by the FDA to detect chlamydia infections in the genitals, the Nucleaic Acid Amplification Test, was also effective in detecting infections of chlamydia and gonorrhea in the rectum and throat.

“However, there are currently no FDA-cleared NAATs to screen for gonorrhea or chlamydia in the throat or rectum,” Douglas added, though NAATs were likely to detect at least twice as many of those infections as a traditional bacterial culture, the current standard for diagnosing infections at non-genital sites.

Douglas added that the CDC is encouraging the FDA and test manufacturers to get approval for using NAATs for throat and rectum infection tests. In the interim, laboratories could use the NAATs for that purpose, but would first have to do in-house studies of their effectiveness.

The CDC said final 2007 statistics would be released late this year in the agency’s annual STD surveillance report.

“The STD burden every year is significant,” according to Fenton, who said that there are 19 million new STD infections annually in this country.