Originally published in The Fuller Project.
Skyrocketing rates of syphilis — a disease that once seemed to be on the wane — is imperiling the lives of thousands of newborns as mothers who have gone untreated pass the sexually transmitted ailment on to their babies, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control shows. If it isn’t diagnosed and treated promptly, syphilis can cause seizures, heart failure and permanent organ damage in children and adults.
The statistics are harrowing: By the end of 2022, syphilis hit a 72-year high, with 205,000 total cases. More than 3,500 of those were in babies — up from just 300 a decade prior, according to CDC statistics. Of those cases nearly 10% resulted in stillbirth or infant death.
Indeed, not since 1950 have more pregnant women and babies been sick with syphilis — a perfect storm of slashed public health funding and the spread of so-called maternity-care deserts, defined as counties lacking maternity-care hospitals or obstetric providers. By one estimate, some 6.9 million U.S. women live in places with no or low access to maternity care.
The tragedy of this is that syphilis, when caught early, is curable with modern-day forms of penicillin — although long-undiagnosed and asymptomatic cases can pose a more complicated treatment regimen. “There really should never be a baby born with congenital syphilis. It’s so treatable,” says Dr. Kimberly Stanford, an emergency medicine specialist whose University of Chicago Medicine screening program diagnoses at least two dozen syphilis patients in her ER every month. Almost half of the patients screened are women of reproductive age — about 1,000 of whom were pregnant last year.
From Stanford’s perspective, lack of access to prenatal care is clearly a main driver of the increase in syphilis cases. “In a society like ours, all pregnant women should have access to that care,” she says. “A preventable condition like this that causes such severe consequences…
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