Mississippi has registered an alarming rise in the number of infants being treated for congenital syphilis.
According to hospital billing data shared with NBC, the number of babies who have been treated for the sexually transmitted disease has increased by more than 900% over five years.
Ten newborns that were born in the poorest American state in 2016 received treatment for the disease. In 2021, 102 newborns were treated for the disease, including at least one who died, according to the Mississippi state health department, NBC reported.
Syphilis is a contagious disease that is mostly spread through sex, but babies can also contract the illness from infected mothers. The disease produces an ulcer in the area where it entered the body, which usually appears between 10 and 60 days after infection.
Congenital syphilis can cause a variety of issues in infants, including disfigured bones, severe anemia, enlarged liver and spleen, jaundice, brain and nerve problems such as blindness and deafness, meningitis and skin rashes. Depending on how long a mother has had syphilis and when – or if – they received treatment, the disease can also result in miscarriages, stillbirths, prematurity and low birth weight.
“This seems like something that should have happened a hundred years ago, not last year,” the medical director of the state health department-run Crossroads Clinic, Thomas Dobbs, told NBC.
“There’s really kind of a shock,” said Dobbs, whose clinic is in the state capital of Jackson and who told the outlet he spoke to healthcare providers who “are absolutely horrified” that babies are still being born with congenital syphilis.
In a statement on Twitter, Dobbs said that “delayed pre-natal care is the primary healthcare risk factor for newborns with syphilis,” adding that the disease is an “entirely treatable problem”.
Medical professionals attribute the rising cases of congenital syphilis to inadequate prenatal healthcare – which includes syphilis testing – as well as an understaffed workforce that has been strained by the Covid pandemic.
“The numbers have been skyrocketing and I think, like so many people, the public health system has been stretched,” the medical director for infectious diseases at Memphis’s Baptist Memorial Healthcare, Steve Threlkeld, told WREG News Channel 3.
“This is just one of those examples where we have the data, we know about the cases but you have to have the manpower to diagnose the patients, then do contact tracing and follow up to make sure they’re continuing to come back for treatment,” Threlkeld – whose hospital is just north of Mississippi’s border with Tennessee – added.
Across the country, cases of congenital syphilis have more than tripled in recent years, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 2,000 cases were reported in 2020, marking a record number of cases reported in one year since 1994.
