In 1995 in England and Wales only 130 cases of syphilis were reported. In the year 2000, fewer than 6,000 cases were reported across the entire US.
The reduction of STIs in the second half of the 20th century through to the turn of the millennium was a real success story and seemed to foreshadow a future of ever-strengthening population health bolstered by vigilant public health authorities on top of their brief.
That’s over.
In the last few years there has been an astounding rise in sexually transmitted infections in many countries.
In the US, cases of syphilis (known colloquially as “the pox”) increased 74% to 176,000 cases in 2021.
In the UK, syphilis cases rose 15% from 2021 to 2022, and gonorrhoea by 50% to reach record levels not seen since widespread testing began in 1948.
In Canada, cases of congenital syphilis, where the infection is passed on in utero from the mother to an unborn baby increased from 2 per 100,000 live births in 2017 to an astonishing 26 per 100,000 births. In Mississippi, cases of congenital syphilis have risen by 900%.
Congenital syphilis can leave a new-born with a range of medical conditions and can also lead to stillbirth.
In Spain cases of syphilis and gonorrhoea in 2022 reached 25-year highs and in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, syphilis cases rose a massive 40% from 2021 to 2022.
In Sweden, home of the early and disastrous covid herd immunity approach, the national health agency reports the country is "bathing in syphilis" with infections at record levels.
Yes, STIs were on the rise before covid, but nothing like we have seen in the last three years. Something has changed. In the UK, despite a rise since 2013, STIs were actually on the decline in the year before the pandemic.
Porn, Covid, T-cells and syphilis
In Europe the syphilis outbreak has struck the porn industry, with actors stopping work and renewing their demands for a union.
The outbreak is getting so bad that Pfizer is warning that it will run out of some antibiotics that treat syphilis later this year.
You can find lots of mass media coverage about this increase. In Britain, several outlets have referred to the return of a medieval disease. Indeed, syphilis was a blight on society for hundreds of years before condoms, public health campaigns and antibiotics.
But none of the many articles on the topic will tell you the most likely cause for the recent accelerating rise: population immunity weakened by mass covid infection policies.
The now-standard excuse of blaming lockdowns is regularly deployed, alongside a vague “there’s more of the infections about” explanation, such as here in this BBC article.
But why, dear reader, might there be “more infections about?”
Some experts have said it’s because more people are having condomless sex, with porn consumption and loss of fear about HIV to blame. There is some data to back this up, but the astonishing increases in the last three years suggests people would have had to rip off their rubbers en masse in 2020. I can’t see it, certainly not as the sole cause. As I have delved into before, experts are only as good as their ability to navigate cognitive biases. Many experts believe the pandemic is over, and few medical professionals understand the systemic nature of a covid infection.
The best explanation for why there are so many more infections around is because of an immunologically weakened population unable to fight off these infections like before. A population exposed to mass and repeated covid infections.
Covid depletes T-cells. T-cells are essential for the normal functioning of an immune system. The only other virus known to so aggressively destroy T-cells is HIV.
Now, when I had a look at research on the immune response to STIs, you can probably guess what I found. T-cells, in particular CD4+ T-cells, are the primary line of immunological defence against syphilis after you are infected. (The primary primary line of defence is a condom).
If you contract syphilis, you don’t always know it. A good proportion of infections (in the past at least) remained asymptomatic. Healthy immune systems can recruit CD4+ T-cells and fight off a syphilis infection without the need for antibiotics, and without a person even knowing they had it.
With an immunologically weaker population, it stands to reason that more infections will show up symptomatically. Population health today is intimately tied to ongoing covid transmission, a fact that many seem in deep denial about. The denial of covid as a systemic disease will continue to degrade societal health and leave people more open to serious outcomes from other viral and bacterial infections. We are already beginning to see this with the 2022 monkeypox, RSV and Strep A outbreaks. The failure of the media to communicate the wider immune impact of a covid infection borders on criminal.
Environmental toxins and pollution
The increase in STIs has got some people worrying about the impact on reproductive health. It seems certain to impact individual reproductive health. Whether this impact is broad enough to show at the population level only time will tell.
But STIs are not the only cause for alarm when it comes to reproductive health. And in fact they may not be the primary reason for alarm. Because sperm counts were falling drastically around the world before covid.
Sperm counts in the west plummeted 59% between 1973 and 2011 according to research co-authored by Shanna Swan, an environmental and reproductive epidemiologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. If these trends keep up, sperm counts will hit zero by 2045.
The exact reasons had been unknown, with smoking, obesity, genetic factors, alcohol consumption, air pollution and pesticides all figured to be causes.
Now a new and compelling meta-study of 27,000 research papers has come up with some answers. Researchers found that air pollution, including exposure to pesticides and insecticides, damages sperm to a greater extent than smoking. Interestingly, alcohol consumption and weight appear to have a minimal effect on sperm quality. Just ahead of exposure to pollution and environmental toxins, a varicocele, an enlargement of the veins within the scrotum (of unknown cause), is the leading reason for low sperm quality.
Zero spunk?
Taken together, humanity has a reproduction problem. Right now, adult males are half as fertile as our grandfathers were. And Swan even suggests it could bring about the extinction of the human race.
I don’t buy that, not least because fertility treatments can often successfully overcome infertility. But it does raise huge ethical and moral questions about access and right to fertility treatments in a spunk-less future. The problem seems tailor made for power-hungry eugenicists and supremacists to sculpt society in their image. You can imagine all sorts of ways that public policy could lock “undesirables” out of fertility treatment while prioritising it for those considered of strong, “deserving” stock. It’s incredibly grim to think about. Maybe it sounds far fetched, but health outcomes right now already select for wealth and privilege. And as the current approach to covid shows, our elites seem quite relaxed about eugenics as public health policy.
Once again, all roads lead back to the urgent necessity for system change.
Stay safe-sex out there.