WEDNESDAY, Dec. 17, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- The number of cases of syphilis in the United States jumped 10 percent from 2012 to 2013, with gay and bisexual men accounting for 75 percent of the increase, U.S. health officials reported Tuesday.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis, 17,357 cases of syphilis were reported in 2013 -- a rate of 5.5 per 100,000 people.
Rates of chlamydia fell for the first time in 30 years, with more than 1.4 million reported cases in 2013. This represented a 1.5 percent decrease from 2012, according to the report. The infection rate was about 446.6 per 100,000 people in 2013. Cases of chlamydia remain concentrated among young women.
Infections of a third sexually transmitted disease -- gonorrhea -- remained roughly unchanged from 2012 to 2013, at a rate of 106.1 per 100,000 people. There were 333,004 reported cases in 2013. Jonathan Mermin, M.D., M.P.H., director of CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention told HealthDay that the rate of drug-resistant gonorrhea has slowed. Still, "there are over 20 million cases of sexually transmitted diseases every year in the United States, and they continue to pose a risk of lifelong complications for millions of Americans," he said.
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