Every hour a baby is born in China with syphilis, as the world’s fastest-growing epidemic of the disease is fueled by men with new money from the nation’s booming economy, researchers say.
The easy-to-cure bacterial infection, which was nearly wiped out in China five decades ago, is now the most commonly reported sexually transmitted disease in Shanghai.
Prostitutes along with gay and bisexual men, many of whom are married with families, are driving the epidemic, a commentary published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) said.
“After China’s economy became increasingly market-based in the 1980s, the growing numbers of Chinese businessmen with money and young women without money translated into expanded demand and supply for the country’s commercial sex industry,” the article said.
“In the ’50s and ’60s in China, syphilis and other STDs were extremely uncommon. The number of new cases has just rapidly accelerated,” Joseph Tucker, lead author and an infectious disease specialist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in an interview with Reuters. “Even one baby born with syphilis in China is unacceptable.”
With no mandatory routine screening in place for pregnant women in China, the rate of mother-to-child transmission jumped from seven to 57 cases per 100,000 live births between 2003 and 2008, Tucker said.
Unlike other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), such as gonorrhea or chlamydia, syphilis can eventually ravage the mind and kill if left untreated. A shot of penicillin is a cheap cure, but many people never experience specific symptoms and the disease remains undiagnosed.
No other country has seen such a rapid rise in syphilis cases since the discovery of penicillin, the researchers said.
In China, at least one-third of men who have sex with other men are also married and the transmission of syphilis to their wives and children is an important issue, the article said.
“The limited data that are available suggest that fear of being identified as a ‘social deviant’ may steer members of marginalized groups away from official ... clinics where licensed physicians use national guidelines and have standardized laboratory facilities,” the article said.
“Although the stigma associated with syphilis and other STIs is present the world over, its burden can be particularly severe in a social structure such as China’s, which highly values dignity or ‘face’ and social relationships,” they said.
Quick syphilis tests using finger-prick blood samples have allowed screening for the disease to be expanded outside clinics, to saunas, brothels and other entertainment venues, the researchers said.
Government programs to help this expansion have laid the foundations to tackle the epidemic, but recognition of the disease as a public health issue was needed to bring syphilis under control.
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