STD Incidence Ranked By City

A website that sells apartment rental agreements has, for some reason, compiled CDC data to rank US cities by incidence of STDs per capita. HIV is not included in their ranking. They write:

Despite our puritan heritage, Americans really love to have sex. It turns out, a lot of us like to have sex without protection, too. Using publicly available data sources, we’ve mapped sexually transmitted diseases across most major cities in the USA. The military helped cities rank strongly in the top 10, with Norfolk Naval Base, Ft. Hood, and Ft. Bragg all pushing their cities to the top. The data used here comes from the CDC for 2013, and reflects reports of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. (Herpes data is not collected). To normalize the data, we measured rates per 100,000 people. We chose only to show cities with a significant amount of population, so rural counties are not show on this map. Specifically, we only ranked cities with a population of at least 50,000 or more. We ignored absolute STDs and only used the rate per 100k to establish rankings. We opted to treat Washington, DC. as a city and not a state. We also chose to represent each borough of NYC separately.

See the full top 100 at the link.

Haters Are Thrilled About Ocular Syphilis

Matt Barber and Bryan Fischer are absolutely thrilled with the news about a handful of cases of ocular syphilis in gay men, which has resulted in two of those men going blind.

LOS ANGELES: Officials Report Possible Cases Of Rare Ocular Syphillis Strain

Via the Los Angeles Times:

Public health officials across the West Coast are urging medical professionals to look out for cases of ocular syphilis – a sexually transmitted disease that can cause blindness – after two potential cases in Los Angeles recently. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health issued an advisory for primary and eye-care providers to look out for symptoms associated with the disease, which is usually a complication of primary or secondary syphilis infections. With more than a dozen cases – most of them among gay men – reported between Seattle and San Francisco and now potentially two in Southern California, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is calling for medical professionals to do more. Some of the patients also are HIV positive, including six in San Francisco. In Seattle, two of the patients went blind.

My report on the Seattle cases is here.

Researchers Unveil Phone Dongle That Tests For HIV & Syphilis In 15 Minutes

Via Science Daily:

A team of researchers, led by Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a low-cost smartphone accessory that can perform a point-of-care test that simultaneously detects three infectious disease markers from a finger prick of blood in just 15 minutes. The device replicates, for the first time, all mechanical, optical, and electronic functions of a lab-based blood test. Specifically, it performs an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) without requiring any stored energy: all necessary power is drawn from the smartphone. It performs a triplexed immunoassay not currently available in a single test format: HIV antibody, treponemal-specific antibody for syphilis, and non-treponemal antibody for active syphilis infection.

The device is estimated to have a production cost of $34, versus the $18K machine typically used to perform ELISA tests. Field testing was completed in Rwanda and funding was provided by the Gates Foundation, among others. (Tipped by JMG reader Alan)

WASHINGTON: Rare Strain Of Ocular Syphilis Leaves Two Men Blind

Via the Seattle Times:

Health officials are warning about an unusual cluster of syphilis infections that strike the eyes, with six cases reported in Washington state since mid-December, including four in King County. Two people have been blinded by the disease. That’s an unusually high number of cases of ocular syphilis, which affects fewer than one in every million people in the general population each year, according to Dr. Russell Van Gelder, chair of the ophthalmology department at the University of Washington. Even among people with syphilis, ocular disease is detected in perhaps 10 percent of patients, he added. The King County cases are all men, including three who report having sex with other men, the group most affected by syphilis in the region. Three are HIV-positive; people with HIV are often infected with syphilis, too.

Local officials urge that MSM seek immediate attention for vision-related issues. (Tipped by JMG reader Bill)

The STD From The Black Lagoon

Towleroad points us to this syphilis alert from the AIDS Committee of Toronto and notes that advertising critic Copyranter is unimpressed.

It’s the ‘ol vintage sci-fi/horror movie poster parody—a popular ad execution idea for social causes recently. And why not? Cause advertising is depressing as hell to work on these days, right? Because humans are a lost fucking cause! So, we human creatives might as well have some fun and get some pretty ads for our precious portfolios while the gettin’s good.

I don't think it's that terrible.

CDC Blames Serosorting For Syphilis Jump

In a discouraging report that notes the seventh straight year of an increase in the rate of syphilis, Centers For Disease Control head of STD prevention Dr. John Douglas notes that most of the increase can be attributed to gay/bisexual men. Douglas goes on to blame the practice of serosorting among HIV-positive gay men for much of the rise in cases.

Douglas said many cases are occurring in HIV-positive men who are choosing other HIV-positive men as sexual partners. "Within that relationship, they are less concerned about the transmission of other conditions. They're not using condoms. They believe that their partner already has got the worst they can get -- they've got an HIV infection," he said.

Serosorting is the controversial practice of only having sex with partners of the same HIV status. The San Francisco Department of Public Health has speculated that the popularity of serosorting among HIV-positive men accounts for that city's simultaneous rise in STDs and decline in new HIV infections. Syphilis is sometimes transmitted by oral sex, for which virtually no gay men use condoms.