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November 30, 2004 -- The number of sexually transmitted chlamydia infections reported in the United States rose more than 5 percent last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday. Total cases of the disease numbered 877,478 in 2003, compared to 834,555 cases in 2002.

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version November 19, 2004, 10:47 a.m. They're Home AloneKids want to know: "Mom, Dad — where are you?" Mary Eberstadt has written an unwelcome book. That doesn't make it any less important or less necessary. But many people will want to look the other way. In Home-Alone America, Eberstadt confronts us with the consequences of a revolution in American parenting that has left children increasingly deprived of time — or any relationship at all — with their mothers and fathers. This revolution has two causes: "The...

Federal health officials are advising doctors to be on the alert for a rare sexually transmitted disease that is on the increase among gay men in the Netherlands and other countries.The disease, lymphogranuloma venereum, or LGV, has been diagnosed in more than 90 gay men in the Netherlands and cases have also been reported in Belgium, France and Sweden.

Crystal methamphetamine -- or "speed" -- seems to be a driving factor behind higher rates of sexually transmitted disease among gay and bisexual men.In one study from San Francisco, gay men who visited a health clinic were twice as likely to be infected with the AIDS virus if they had recently used the illegal drug. And they were nearly five times as likely to be diagnosed with syphilis.Armed with the new statistics, federal health officials said Wednesday they're searching for effective ways to cope with what they see as a growing threat. Among other things, researchers are studying the...

'Not a simple answer' for desert’s syphilis problem By Brian Joseph The Desert SunPALM SPRINGS -- In the year since health officials warned of a growing syphilis problem here, the alarming but easily curable disease continues to overrun the Coachella Valley.Despite a year of education and testing efforts, Palm Springs alone has a syphilis rate of 81.8 per 100,000 people in 2003, twice the rate of the nation’s No. 1 city for syphilis, San Francisco.As of the end of August, 73 cases were reported in Riverside County, compared with 78 during the same period in 2003. In both years,...

The Centers for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for October 29, 2004, describes a rare homosexually-transmitted venereal disease that may soon come to the United States. The disease is called Lymphogranuloma Venereum (LGV), a variant of Chlamydia and it is spreading in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Sweden. The disease rarely occurs in the U.S. or other industrialized nations. The CDC report noted that the Netherlands had only experienced an average of five cases of LGV a year but in 17 months preceding September, 2004, the nation had tracked 92 cases of LGV. Sixty-two of these cases occured...

Gay men in San Francisco have a new way to tell each other the difficult news that they may have been infected with a sexually transmitted disease. On Wednesday a program called InSPOT began. An acronym for Internet Notification Service for Partners or Tricks, InSPOT allows users an anonymous way, via stylish e-mail cards, to tell sex partners that they may be infected. The people behind the cards say it was important not to be accusatory. One of the six different cards features a message that reads: "Who? What? When? Where? It doesn't matter. I got an STD; you might...

A lawsuit that accuses a Virginia Beach man of intentionally passing herpes to his lover may have implications for a state law on fornication between unmarried adults. Attorneys for a woman identified only as Jane Doe filed suit this month in Circuit Court, claiming that a Virginia Beach man gave the woman genital herpes after the two began having sexual relations in April. According to the lawsuit, the man persuaded the woman to have unprotected sex many times and "intentionally withheld the fact that he was infected" with genital Herpes Simplex Virus 2. The woman seeks $5 million in compensatory...

Contraceptive is linked to high STD risk By Rita Rubin, USA TODAYUse of the contraceptive Depo Provera appears to triple women's risk of infection with chlamydia and gonorrhea, a study reports Monday.An estimated 20 million to 30 million women worldwide use Depo Provera, which is injected into the arm or buttocks every three months."It's popular among young women particularly," says Christine Mauck of the Contraceptive Research and Development Program in Arlington, Va. Not only is it convenient and effective, says Mauck, who wasn't involved in the new study, "it can't be found by your mother."But other studies have suggested that...

All plants and animals that reproduce sexually may develop sexually transmitted infections. They are also very common among humans. Unfortunately, many people consider sexually transmitted infection a moral issue. But the stigma and shame that result may lead people to neglect taking good care of their sexual health. Many people find it very difficult to talk about their sexual health. But discomfort and shame can get in the way of common sense. They can keep people from taking good care of themselves and their partners by practicing safer sex and getting annual sexual-health checkups with their health care providers.

SO VENEREAL DISEASE (as it was once called, in a strange tribute to Venus) has increased by 1,000 per cent since 1995, notably among the young. More than 1,000 cases of the nasty, lingering chlamydia occurred among girls under 15 last year. Everyone agrees that the rate of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), as they are now called, is disastrous. But there is an ideological war over how to halt the spread. In one corner are the liberals, who say that young people indulge in risky behaviour because they are ignorant, so we must have more and better sex education and...

Rates of sexually transmitted infections in Britain rose again last year despite new programs aimed at reining in a decade of increases, health experts said Tuesday. The number of infections - 708,083 - was 4 percent higher than in 2002, but Britain's Health Protection Agency said the pace of the increase appears to be slowing. The statistics do not include HIV infections, which are tracked separately. Sexually transmitted diseases have been on the rise across Europe since the mid-1990s. Health experts partly blame complacency over condom use and casual sex as fear of HIV has eased. Such infections are not...

LONDON (Reuters) - Young travelers and sex tourists are returning from exotic locations with more than just tans and souvenirs. For some, infections such as syphilis and HIV are lingering reminders of a holiday romance. "A large proportion of people are having sexual intercourse with new partners when they go abroad...and are putting themselves at risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs)," said Dr Karen Rogstad of the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, England. In a report published in the British Medical Journal on Friday, Rogstad reviewed research studies on STIs and searched global health Web Sites and others that could...

Ten weeks before San Francisco shocked the nation by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, the city quietly took another step in America's cultural revolution by liberalizing its massage permit laws to the point where some critics call it de facto legalization of prostitution. Addressing the issue of sex workers in the massage industry, outgoing Mayor Willie Brown, with the nearly unanimous support of the Board of Supervisors, signed a new law Dec. 5 that redefines it as a public health issue rather than a matter of law enforcement. The law went into effect July 1. By removing a requirement...

BEERSHEBA, Israel (Reuters) - There were whispers in the Kremlin and salons of Europe for decades but it was never more than idle gossip until a team of Israeli doctors announced that they had solved an 80-year-old medical mystery. Reuters Photo   The posthumous diagnosis by two psychiatrists and a neurologist recently published in the European Journal of Neurology was that the great Russian revolutionary and Soviet icon Vladimir Lenin died an agonizing death from syphilis. "It's an amazing story, the degeneration of Lenin's mental and neurological state," said psychiatrist Dr Eliezer Witztum. The doctors' diagnosis of crippling neurosyphilis that...

 Internet Use and Early Syphilis Infection Among Men Who Have Sex with Men --- San Francisco, California, 1999--2003 During the summer of 1999, an outbreak of early syphilis among men who have sex with men (MSM) who met their sex partners on the Internet (1) presaged a rapidly expanding syphilis epidemic in San Francisco. By 2002, San Francisco had the highest rates of primary and secondary syphilis of any metropolitan area in the United States (2). During 1998--2002, the number of early syphilis cases increased, from 41 cases in 1998 to 495 cases in 2002 (3). Concomitant with the increase...

Syphilis Becoming Resistant to Oral Antibiotic By Megan Rauscher NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Some strains of the bacterium that causes syphilis have developed a mutation that makes them resistant to Zithromax (known generically as azithromycin), doctors warn in this week's New England Journal of Medicine "This is important because an increasing number of physicians are azithromycin using for treatment of patients with syphilis and for sexual contacts," Dr. Sheila A. Lukehart, from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, told Reuters Health. The recommended treatment for syphilis is penicillin, to which there is currently no evidence of resistance. "However, penicillin injections...

Antibiotic-resistant strain of syphilis is spreading A fast-spreading mutant strain of syphilis has proved resistant to the antibiotic pills that are offered to some patients as an alternative to painful penicillin shots. Since the late 1990s, doctors and public health clinics have been giving azithromycin to some syphilis patients because the long-acting antibiotic pill was highly effective and easy to use. Four pills taken at once were usually enough to cure syphilis. But now researchers at University of Washington in Seattle have found at least 10 percent of syphilis samples from patients at sexually transmitted disease clinics in four cities...

Phoenix police arrested two men accused of luring boys to their home for sex. Sargent Randy Force says 28-year-old Thomas Christopher Herbert and 37-year-old Robert John Price were arrested yesterday. They face charges of sexual exploitation of a minor, sexual conduct with a minor and an obscene materials charge. Court records show the men have H-I-V and may have infected their victims. Force says investigators arrested the men after receiving a tip from federal immigration authorities, who were investigating child pornography. Police believe the men would meet teenage boys in chat rooms and then lure them to their central Phoenix...