Mississippi hit by 900 pct increase in newborns treated for syphilis: report

NEW YORK, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- The number of babies in the southeastern U.S. state of Mississippi being treated for congenital syphilis has jumped by more than 900 percent over five years, uprooting the progress the nation's poorest state had made in nearly quashing what experts say is an avoidable public health crisis, reported NBC News last week.

"The rise in cases has placed newborns at further risk of life-threatening harm in a state that's already home to the nation's worst infant mortality rate," said the report.

In 2021, 102 newborns in Mississippi were treated for the sexually transmitted disease, up from 10 in 2016, according to an analysis of hospital billing data shared by Thomas Dobbs, the medical director for the Mississippi State Department of Health's Crossroads Clinic in Jackson, which focuses on sexually transmitted infections.

"This seems like something that should have happened a hundred years ago, not last year," Dobbs, who is also dean of the John D. Bower School of Population Health at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, was quoted as saying. "There's really kind of a shock."

The Mississippi State Department of Health does not formally track congenital syphilis deaths but said there was at least one baby who died in 2021. Congenital syphilis occurs when the infection is passed from a mother to her child while she's pregnant. If untreated, a pregnant woman with syphilis has an 80 percent chance of passing it to her baby, according to the report.