How does that do in the blood supply?
Howdy Dio! Not very well, as it turns out (thank God) - back in my path lab days we never did get it to grow in vitro. Unfortunately there are plenty of live carriers. Most labs use rabbits.
Interesting little critter - those proteins on the outer cell walls that identify a foreign organism to the immune system? T palladium doesn't have them, or at least not enough to count, which is why it persists in a host for decades. Very high transmission rate - you'll read 30% on the Internet but I think it's actually a lot higher than that, especially with the repeated exposure typical of unprotected gay sex.
It's still curable by a single shot of penicillin, which is why a lot of people apparently think being careless is OK. Except that infection increases the susceptibility to HIV in the meantime. There are antibiotic-resistant strains but mostly they're resistant to antibiotics other than penicillin, which is bad news for people allergic to penicillin. Given how little it survives outside the body and how sensitive it is to penicillin, we could wipe this disease out in theory. In practice, it's growing.