Mississippi has registered an alarming rise in the number of infants being treated for congenital syphilis.
According to hospital billing data shared with NBC News, the number of babies who have been treated for the sexually transmitted disease has increased by more than 900 percent over five years.
Ten newborns that were born in the poorest US state in 2016 received treatment for the disease. In 2021, 102 newborns were treated for the disease, including at least one who died, according to the Mississippi State Department of Health, NBC reported.
Syphilis is a contagious disease that is mostly spread through sex, but babies can also contract the illness from infected mothers. The disease produces an ulcer in the area where it entered the body, which usually appears between 10 and 60 days after infection.
Congenital syphilis can cause a variety of issues in infants, including disfigured bones, severe anemia, enlarged liver and spleen, jaundice, brain and nerve problems such as blindness and deafness, meningitis and skin rashes.
Depending on how long a mother has had syphilis and when — or if — they received treatment, the disease can also result in miscarriages, stillbirths, premature births and low birth weight.
“This seems like something that should have happened a hundred years ago, not last year,” Crossroads Clinic medical director Thomas Dobbs said.
“There’s really kind of a shock,” said Dobbs, whose clinic is in the state capital, Jackson.
Healthcare providers “are absolutely horrified” that babies are still being born with congenital syphilis, he added.
“Delayed prenatal care is the primary healthcare risk factor for newborns with syphilis,” Dobbs wrote on Twitter, adding that the disease is an “entirely treatable problem.”
Medical professionals attribute the rising cases of congenital syphilis to inadequate prenatal healthcare — which includes syphilis testing — as well as an understaffed workforce that has been strained by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The numbers have been skyrocketing and I think, like so many people, the public health system has been stretched,” said Steve Threlkeld, the medical director for infectious diseases at Memphis’s Baptist Memorial Healthcare.
“This is just one of those examples where we have the data, we know about the cases, but you have to have the manpower to diagnose the patients, then do contact tracing and follow up to make sure they’re continuing to come back for treatment,” said Threlkeld — whose hospital is just north of Mississippi’s border with Tennessee.
Cases of congenital syphilis across the US have more than tripled in recent years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
More than 2,000 cases were reported in 2020, the highest number of cases reported in one year since 1994.
It is usually a serene two-and-a-half-hour ride on Japan’s famously efficient bullet train, but on Saturday, the journey quickly descended into a zombie apocalypse, with passengers screaming in terror. Organizers of the adrenaline-filled trip, less than two weeks before Halloween, touted it as the world’s first haunted house experience on a running Shinkansen. On board one chartered car of the Shinkansen, about 40 thrill-seekers were ready to brave an encounter with the living dead between Tokyo and the western metropolis of Osaka. The eerie experience was inspired by the hit 2016 South Korean action-horror movie Train to Busan, in which a father and
IRANIAN THREATS: Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami said that it would be a ‘mistake’ for Israel to attack Iran and if it did ‘we will strike you again painfully’ Israel yesterday bombed a Syrian coastal city, while the US conducted multiple strikes on targets in Yemen nearly a month into Israel’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza all belong to the so-called “axis of resistance” led by Iran, which on Oct. 1 conducted a missile strike on Israel. Israel has vowed to retaliate for the strike. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards chief Hossein Salami yesterday said in a speech that Tehran would hit Israel “painfully” if it attacks Iranian targets. “If you make a mistake and attack our targets, whether in the region or in
NEW RECRUITS: A video released by Ukrainian officials allegedly shows dozens of North Koreans lining up to collect military fatigues from Russian servicemen Russian aerial strikes wounded more than a dozen and knocked out electricity for tens of thousands of Ukrainians overnight in attacks on residential areas as temperatures dropped toward freezing, Kyiv said yesterday. Ukraine also said it had targeted a crucial Russian explosives factory, about 750km from the border, in an overnight drone attack, while Moscow said it had shot down 110 drones, the largest attempted aerial barrage by Kyiv in more than two weeks. At least 17 people were wounded in an attack on Kryvyi Rig, Ukraine, including a first responder, the Ukrainian State Emergency Service said. “At night, the enemy attacked Kryvyi
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the