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Syphilis

Orion Handsfield

Syphilis is one of the five originally recognized venereal diseases, with gonorrhea and the now rare sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) chancroid, lymphogranuloma venereum, and Donovanosis (granuloma inguinale).  The causative being, which belongs to a class of bacteria called spirochetes, is Treponema pallidum, one of the few foremost disease-causing organisms that still has not been successfully grown in the laboratory, significantly affecting diagnosis and impeding analysis.  Before the emergence of AIDS, syphilis was far and away the STD with the greatest contribution to expiry and disability.  Although syphilis continues to have serious health impacts in many areas of the ball, it is now uncommon in the United States, with fewer than 20,000 new infections annually, on the whole limited to small population segments at particularly outrageous risk.

This Knol addresses syphilis in the United States.  The gen on frequency, risk factors, and populations at risk fasten generally to other industrialized countries; the descriptions of symptoms, complications, treatment, and controlling are applicable everywhere.

It is difficult to overstate the significance of syphilis and its smash on human history and culture.  It was long believed that syphilis was introduced to Europe by crewmembers of Columbus’ expeditions who were infected in the Americas.  However, other syphilis-like infections caused by closely connected spirochetes—including the modern diseases called yaws, pinta, “endemic syphilis,” and perhaps other now-outmoded variations of the disease—probably evolved in most weak populations, and the “Columbian” theory remains chance, despite the recent exploitation of modern methods to analyze the genetic relatedness of sundry strains of T. pallidum and other spirochetes.  Whatever its origins, the European syphilis pandemic of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, spreading northward from what is now Italy, utterly was new.  Controversy exists as to whether morbus gallicus (the French disability), the dominant name at the time, was more severe or death rates higher than qualified in later centuries.  Rapid spread in a time past unexposed population could enhance the frequency of severe outcomes, but it is equally meretricious that early writers unwittingly (or perhaps intentionally) exaggerated their descriptions of a new accustom attributed both to a foreign invader and divine retribution.

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