Syphilis: Beware and Be Tested!

So, it has been awhile since I have talked about one of the fastest spreading infections in Utah: syphilis.

Interestingly, syphilis was once thought to be eradicated. It had its time back in the 1930s and 1940s and was so noteworthy that it generated one of the first public health interventions at the hands of the U.S. Public Health Services. Syphilis cases were so endemic in many communities in the United States that at one point in the ’40s, an estimated on- in-four black men in the South were infected. Syphilis was also behind one of the worst moments in the history of U.S. public health services: the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments, in which health workers withheld penicillin (which can cure syphilis) from black people with the disease who were participating in a study.