This
devastating disease is preventable, but Texas leads the nation in new cases
BY CIARA MCCARTHY UPDATED MARCH 11, 2022 4:34 PM
Texas is leading the
nation in new cases of a devastating and completely preventable disease:
congenital syphilis. Congenital syphilis refers to cases of syphilis that are
passed from a mother to child during pregnancy. Left untreated, the disease can
cause miscarriages, stillbirths, and early infant death. For the children who
do survive, untreated syphilis can lead to meningitis and other brain
infections, blindness and deafness, liver disease, severe anemia, and more,
said Dr. Kjersti Aagaard, an expert in obstetrics and infectious diseases. But
each case is preventable. “The fact that we still have congenital syphilis is
one of the great public health failures of our time,” said Aagaard, a professor
and maternal fetal medicine specialist at the Baylor College of Medicine and
Texas Children’s Hospital. “We have had a test for it for decades, we’ve had a
treatment for it for decades, neither of which are expensive.”...
This is a great post. It is so interesting that treatment and prevention have been around for so long yet issues with the disease are still around, and with that, growing.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting topic. You would think with having the ability to test for it and options for treatment or prevention would lower the cases of this disease. I makes me question do people even care about their health or the health of their children?
ReplyDeleteHow is this not a bigger concern in the media? This is the first time i'm being made aware of this issue. Maybe I should check out news outlets more often but nonetheless! The public health system in America needs to be completely revamped if situations like this continue to exist! The problem is "there is no money in it" as we've learned from The Premonition.
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