WOMEN’S BODIES: SYPHILIS
Until the discovery of penicillin, syphilis was the best known and more feared of the STDs. The word still makes most people flinch.
When I was a small child there was an interesting poster on the wall of the public toilet in the shopping street of our town. It showed black outlines of a woman and a man, with arrows pointing to explosive-looking red stars inside their bodies. When I learned to read I discovered that it said SYPHILIS STRIKES HERE! AND HERE! AND HERE! When I asked ‘Mum, what’s syphilis?’, Mum appeared embarrassed and answered A nasty disease, but little girls don’t get it. Hurry up now, we’re running late’. I got the message that it was something I shouldn’t ask about, but I wondered if it caused Dad’s stiff knee (there was a red star on the poster man’s knee).
Syphilis is caused by an organism called Treponema pallidum, a combination of the Greek and
Latin for ‘pale turning thread’. You may also hear it called a spirochaete (from the Greek meaning ‘coiled like a serpent’), a term that describes all germs of this shape. When it’s seen live under the microscope, the treponema is a tiny coil that constantly twists like a corkscrew or bends in the middle.
The best-known theory about how syphilis arrived in Europe is that in 1493 Christopher Columbus and his crew brought it back on their return from the Americas. However syphilis reached them, the Europeans had no immunity and the disease spread rapidly. In the late fifteenth century it was called the ‘Great Pox’. The French called it ‘the Neapolitan disease’ and the Italians called it ‘the French disease’. The name ‘syphilis’ comes from a poem written in 1521 about a shepherd of that name who had the disease.
Most syphilis is caught by having sex with someone who has it and is infectious. When genital sores caused by syphilis are rubbed against a sexual partner, the spirochaetes may be transferred through a small break in the partner’s genital skin or membranes.
Occasionally syphilis can be transferred non-sexually. The spirochaetes live in the blood and pass into the discharge or ooze from sores or wounds of people with primary or secondary stages of syphilis, and possibly could be transferred if these fluids are in contact with the broken surface of someone else’s body.
Syphilis can pass from a mother to the blood of her foetus at any stage of pregnancy.
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