Syphilis and other STDs are on the rise. States lost millions of dollars to fight and treat them

There's a rapid increase of syphilis cases across the country, including babies who are getting the disease from their mothers when the kids are bornState and local health departments across the U.S found out in June they’d be losing the final two years of a $1 billion investment to strengthen the ranks of people who track and try to prevent sexually transmitted diseases — especially the rapid increase of syphilis cases.

“It was devastating, really, because we had worked so hard to shore up our workforce and also implement new activities,” said Sam Burgess, the STD/HIV program director for the Louisiana Department of Health. His state was slated to receive more than $14 million overall, but instead got $8.6 million that must be spent by January 2026."And we're still scrambling to try to figure out how we can plug some of those funding gaps.

Lupita Thornton, a public health investigator manager in the health department, said she is worried about being able to treat pregnant syphilis patients “before 30 days of delivery, for the baby’s sake.” The department has used the money to hire disease intervention specialists and epidemiologists — including Graves. But Thornton said she could use “double of everything," and had planned to bring down the caseload for her investigators by hiring even more people.“You got people that don't want to go in and get treatment. You have people that don't want to answer the phone, so you got to continue to call," Graves said.

Arizona has the highest rate of congenital syphilis in the nation: 232.3 cases per 100,000 live births. The federal money helped the state Department of Health Services clear out a backlog of several thousands of non-syphilis STD investigations that had been stalled for years, said Rebecca Scranton, the deputy bureau chief of infectious disease and services.

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