THURSDAY, Dec. 19, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- The surging popularity of Internet dating is behind the alarming rise in syphilis cases among gay men in San Francisco, new research says.
Last year, San Francisco recorded almost 500 new cases of syphilis, the highest rate in a generation and a more than tenfold increase over 1998. Of the new cases, 434 occurred in gay men, who now account for about 90 percent of new syphilis cases in the city.
Much of the spike, researchers say, can be linked to the ease of finding sex partners on Internet sites, which have been called the "bathhouses of the 21st century."
The proportion of gay or bisexual men with syphilis who reported meeting sex partners online nearly tripled, from 12 percent in 2000 to about 33 percent by 2002. That dwarfed the share of men who made pickups at bars (20 percent), bathhouses (13 percent), sex clubs (12.6 percent), or adult bookstores (5 percent).
In the second half of 2002, 37 percent of gay or bisexual men with syphilis said they used the Internet to meet other men, according to the research published in the Dec. 19 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a journal of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Data from this year suggest that more than half the men now seeking other men for sex do so on the Web, says Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a sexual health expert at the San Francisco Department of Public Health and a member of the research group.
"It continues to increase," says Klausner. "In 2003, we're up to 56 percent."
The good news, according to disease control experts, is that unlike pickups at bathhouses, bars or bookstores, men who meet over the Internet leave a paper trail of sorts -- an e-mail address. That allows public health officials to confidentially alert sex partners of infected men to the possibility they, too, might be infected.
Syphilis, once considered deadly, is easily treated with a single shot of penicillin and, if caught early, doesn't cause permanent harm.
Klausner and his colleagues have been working with Internet service providers (ISPs) and specific sites to promote safe sex awareness and testing for sexual infections on their match pages.
Gay-oriented sites have tended to be quite willing to help, Klausner says. But, he adds, America Online (AOL), which hosts meeting rooms, has ignored repeated requests to address the issue.
The Virginia-based AOL, the nation's largest ISP, did not make anyone immediately available for comment Thursday.
Internet dating is enormously popular among America's singles, straight and gay alike. Many predominately heterosexual sites, like Match.com and JDate.com, also serve homosexual clientele, who also have access to exclusively gay sites such as Gay.com, glimpse.com, and Male2Male.com.
Perry Halkitis, a psychologist at New York University who studies gay issues, says people who use the Internet to find sex often are "highly sexually compulsive. They have rash, uncontrollable desires for sex that they can't seem to keep under control."
Before the rise of online dating, these people, gay and straight, had to venture out to meet potential sex partners. Not so anymore.
"You can do it 24 hours a day from the comfort of your living room," Halkitis says. Not only does the Internet provide unprecedented access to the local dating scene, he adds, its doors open onto the whole world of seekers.
The jump in syphilis cases is related to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Two-thirds of the men in San Francisco with syphilis also were HIV-positive. Many gay men with HIV feel they have nothing to lose by having unprotected sex, Halkitis says, or with men who have the virus as well. "They have a belief that there's no real risk for them," he adds.
However, in addition to putting themselves at risk of other sexually transmitted infections, such as syphilis and gonorrhea, they also expose HIV-negative men to the AIDS virus.
The incidence of HIV among gay and bisexual men in the United States rose 17 percent between 1999 and 2002, in part because of this unsafe behavior, Halkitis says.
More information
Learn about syphilis from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the National Institutes of Health.
