A lot of this is reckless sexual behaviour. It’s incredibly frustrating, because one of the medications used to treat syphilis is now in short demand globally. This medication is also used to treat other (potentially fatal) infections. In other words, through no fault of their own people will (or likely already have) died due to people not practising safe sex.
It’s easy to blame people on tinder, but sex education and poor healthcare are just as much to blame.
For example, syphillis is often spread orally. I don’t know many people who would wear a condom to give someone a BJ, even if it’s a random hookup with someone whose sexual history they don’t know.
The thing is my kids era had way better sex education the I did, and parent child talks about dangers because we came out of the AIDS era, but it seems my kids generation has a lack or comprehension about abstract dangers.
This is a sensitive subject, but that’s partly changed thanks to drugs like Truvada and PrEP.
You can now have sex with someone who has HIV and still not contract it. People are having more unprotected sex, safe in the knowledge that they’re on PrEP and they basically can’t contract HIV anymore. Hell, AFAIK you can even take a large dose of PrEP or Truvada AFTER you’ve had risky sex. This is great news. Not having safe sex isn’t. It’s a problem in the gay community.
Important caveat: apparently people are also getting tested more often exactly because HIV is now far more treatable or preventable, which means doctors are diagnosing cases of syphilis which would otherwise have gone undetected (syphillis can often be asymptomatic until it starts causing serious damage):
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/syphilis-rates-gay-bisexual-men/
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While federal officials have called syphilis an “ongoing crisis,” Rourke said the situation should be dubbed an emergency that requires urgent on-the-ground efforts — before more vulnerable Canadians bear the brunt of escalating outbreaks.
While rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea dipped starting in 2020, likely due to reduced testing during COVID-related restrictions, syphilis maintained its upward trend after a briefer lull and remains a major concern for public health officials.
In recent years the country’s syphilis rates were also rising faster than in the United States or Europe, a Reuters report noted in March 2023, which pinned the spike on poor health-care access and discrimination faced by Canada’s Indigenous communities, concentrated across the Prairies.
Adam Grant, an Edmonton-based registered nurse and sexually transmitted and blood-borne illness team lead with Indigenous Services Canada, has met with pregnant individuals who find out they’re infected with syphilis at various points in their pregnancy.
Awareness of bacterial STIs also dropped over time, leading clinicians to assume syphilis was no longer a threat, noted Dr. Kevin Woodward, an associate professor at McMaster University in Hamilton and the medical and executive director at HQ Toronto, a health hub offering STI and HIV testing.
The federal government does publish national syphilis guidelines, provides surge capacity to regions impacted by outbreaks, and offers “ongoing and time-limited” funding for community-based organizations to conduct outreach, education and testing, the statement continues.
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Well, since there is no syphilis vaccine, nobody is vaccinated.
Kaboom.
Canada has mandatory screening (and treatment) of migrants. AFAIK the US doesn’t but 96% choose to be screened anyway.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/ss/ss7102a1.htm
This isn’t a migrant issue. It’s a homegrown issue. (And if you want to blame foreigners, US citizens seem like a more likely culprit given skyrocketing US rates of infection and poor health care availiability/affordability)
Also, there is no vaccine against syphilis.
