The Clap

Back when I was working for a community based public health agency, we thought we were close to conquering the common sexually transmitted infections -- syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia. We spent a lot of effort on HIV prevention because it ' s incurable, but the incidence (that means the number of new cases per given time period) was declining, and the other STIs were becoming pretty rare. The public health response to these diseases basically has two components: convince people to use condoms whenever they have risky sex, and detect new cases quickly and treat them.Well there ' s bad news, and it isn ' t getting much attention:the incidence of STIs has exploded in recent years. We ' ve lost all the ground we had gained and then some:Nearly 2.3 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis were diagnosed in the United States in 2017, according to preliminary data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the National STD Prevention Conference in Washington, D.C. This surpassed the previous record set in 2016 by more than 200,000 cases and marked the fourth consecutive year of sharp increases in these sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).The CDC analysis of STD cases reported for 2013 and preliminary data for 2017 shows steep, sustained increases:Gonorrhea diagnoses increased 67 percent overall (from 333,004 to 555,608 cases according to preliminary 2017 data) and nearly doubled among men (from 169,130 to 322,169). Increases in diagnose...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs