Who has it and where?

CDC Reporting

The Division of Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), came up with a plan in 1999 that was aimed at eliminating syphilis from the United States with specific goals to reduce the number of primary and secondary cases to less than 1000 and increasing the number of syphilis-free counties to 90 percent by 2005.1 After several years of this project being implemented the CDC noticed problems with the ways in which new cases were being reported and revamped the project again in 2006 with the slogan "Together We Can SEE: Syphilis Elimination Effort."2 The report can be found here. While all states have laws mandating physicians to report all cases of syphilis, often it is the labs that end up doing the reporting. The report found here goes into great detail about how the US can improve our reporting system to better track cases of syphilis around the country.

Where do people have syphilis?

It may not come as much surprise that in general there are higher rates of syphilis where there are more people living. Take a look at these two maps. The first one shows syphilis cases by county in blue from 2013, and the map beneath shows population density in red taken from the 2010 census.

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Because there is mandatory reporting of every syphilis case, there is plenty of information on the infection from the race/ethnicity of people with the infection, the sex and sexual orientation of the people, and the number of people with syphilis in individual states. The next graph represent the number of syphilis cases per 100,000 in the state of Washington broken up by county followed by a chart with similar information, but including previous years and the number of congenital cases.

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Finally, the graph below shows the numbers of people reported to have syphilis in 2013 broken up race, by sex, and then further broken up for males into men who have sex with women (MSW) and men who have sex with men (MSM).

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More information on syphilis cases in other states and territories can be found here.

References:

1: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2003). Recommendations for Public Health Surveillance of Syphilis in the United States. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

2: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2006). Together we can: The National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis from the United States. Atlanta, GA: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

3: Syphilis Statistics. (2015, February 9). Retrieved April 9, 2015, from http://www.cdc.gov/std/syphilis/stats.htm

4: US census maps – demographics. Retrieved April 12, 2015, from http://ecpmlangues.u-strasbg.fr/civilization/geography/US-census-maps-demographics.html