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WETZSTEIN: Sounding alarm on gonorrhea
April 27, 2010
Washington Times
Cheryl Wetzstein
Washington,
D.C.,
is filled with people who are genuine experts on their issues. So my news
antenna always perks up when I hear someone who I know is smart, savvy and
deeply invested in his issue say he has "missed" something.
William Smith, whom I have quoted
for years based on his extensive knowledge about teen pregnancy and sexual
health issues, has written an article for RH Reality Check.org. It is
called, "What I didn’t know about sexual health."
Mr. Smith is executive director of
the National Coalition of STD Directors, a trade group for people working to
stem the tide of sexually transmitted diseases. I think his observations are
valid — and alarming — enough to be repeated here.
• "We are on the verge of a highly
untreatable gonorrhea epidemic," he writes.
Gonorrhea, once in decline, has
thoroughly rebounded, with more than 336,000 cases reported in 2008. It
disproportionately affects young people and blacks. Untreated gonorrhea
increases risk for HIV infection and can lead to infertility, among other
undesirable outcomes.
Years ago, gonorrhea was easily
cured with antibiotics. But, as Mr. Smith writes, "Bacteria have a funny way
of developing resistance to treatments" — its as if they have "their own
built-in evolutionary survival mode."
Gonorrhea has mutated so
efficiently that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has
"just a single class of antibiotics left" to treat it, and resistance is
forming even to those drugs, Mr. Smith writes. With a "nearly empty"
pipeline of new drugs to fight gonorrhea, "the prospects of this situation
are frightening."
• "We are about to grasp defeat
from the jaws of victory in the battle against syphilis."
Syphilis was once even closer to
eradication than gonorrhea, but now "the nations efforts to combat syphilis
… have virtually collapsed," Mr. Smith writes.
In 2008, the United States had
13,500 syphilis cases — the highest since 1995 — and another 431 cases of
mother-child-transmitted congenital syphilis.
"In Chicago last year," Mr. Smith
recalled, "one colleague told me that two babies died of congenital
syphilis.
"Yes, in the 21st century United
States of America, children die of syphilis. Where is the outcry?"
Mr. Smith also writes about how STD
workers who search out sex partners of infected people (a job that requires
"Columbo-like detective skills," chutzpah and compassion) are "unsung
heroes," and how the STD-fighting world has an unacceptably low level of
political advocacy.
I particularly agree with Mr. Smith
about the lack of advocacy on STDs. It seems as if the media, like everyone
else, aren't eager to talk about STDs (at least beyond the "marquee" disease
of AIDS).
That might be fine, except the U.S.
is in the throes of a massive STD epidemic.
I watched last year as the media
beat the drums for the H1N1 virus. People kept throwing around the
"pandemic" word, and in August, a White House council said the nation was
facing a "plausible scenario" of as many as 1.8 million hospitalizations and
up to 90,000 deaths just in the coming months. Full-court-press hysteria
ensued.
In February, however, the CDC said
that if all swine flu events were counted (back to April 2009), fewer than
378,000 people were hospitalized and fewer than 17,160 people died, with the
most likely toll being 11,690.
Perhaps the August projections were
exaggerated, but there is no doubt that an alarmed nation responded.
I haven't seen the American STD
epidemic get upgraded to a pandemic, but with 19 million newly reported
STD
cases each year, it sure could be.
And we are not talking about 19
million cases of annoying but nonfatal genital skin problems, either. Every
year, 20,000 Americans die of diseases contracted by risky sexual behavior,
says a 2004 study by Ali Mokdad published in the Journal of the American
Medical Association.
Without a doubt, a tsunami of
sexual disease is flooding our population. One would think there could be a
few more headlines about it.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/27/wetzstein-sounding-alarm-on-gonorrhea/print/
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