Gonorrhea and syphilis cases reached record levels during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“STDs had already been increasing for quite some time, but Covid-19 exacerbated the factors that contribute to it in many ways,” Leandro Mena, the CDC’s director of STD Prevention, told POLITICO in a phone interview.
“We have had more than a decade of decreasing public health funding that’s caused a dropoff in STD screening, prevention, education, and other health services. We’ve also been dealing with an increase in substance use that has been linked to less safe sexual practices.”
The worst consequence to come out of the CDC report released this week is the incidence of congenital syphilis.
Congenital syphilis – syphilis passed from mother to fetus – led to 149 infant deaths or stillbirths in 2020. According to preliminary estimates, there were 2,268 infants born with syphilis in 2021, a sevenfold rise from 2012, and 166 of them died, reports Physician’s Weekly.
Sadly, most cases of congenital syphilis deaths can be prevented with penicillin shots at least 30 days before birth, but most women involved received little or no prenatal care, and services have been chronically underfunded in recent years.
“The really depressing thing about it is we had this thing virtually eradicated back in the year 2000,” William Andrews, a public information officer for Oklahoma’s sexual health and harm reduction service says.
“Now it’s back with a vengeance. We are really trying to get the message out that sexual health is health. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” Analysts say that when inflation is taken into account, CDC prevention funding for STDs has fallen around 40 percent over the last 20 years.
Reported cases of chlamydia declined 13 percent from 2019 but experts suspect this is misleading – since the disease is often asymptomatic and detected through screening, such as routine pap smears, reports Science Alert.
Over half of reported STDs were among 16 to 24-year-olds. Racial minorities including Black, Hispanic, and Native American people were disproportionately impacted, while 42 percent of cases of primary and secondary syphilis were among gay and bisexual males.
