UMMC receives $1M in federal funds to combat syphilis in Mississippi

Published on Monday, August 5, 2024

By: Danny Barrett Jr., dlbarrett@umc.edu

Efforts to bring down Mississippi’s alarming rate of congenital syphilis the past few years is receiving some much-needed help this month.

Thanks to a $1 million grant from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, a collaborative effort at the University of Mississippi Medical Center will launch a yearlong intensive initiative to increase syphilis awareness, testing and treatment – with a specific focus on preventing and treating syphilis in pregnancy.

“It’s a nationwide problem but it’s especially problematic here,” said. Dr. Thomas Dobbs, dean of the John D. Bower School of Population Health at UMMC. “And our numbers might be higher since the detection and reporting of STIs (sexually transmitted infections) were significantly less during the pandemic years.”

In 2021, Mississippi ranked sixth in the nation for syphilis incidence, at 28.1 cases per 100,000 people, and fourth nationally on congenital syphilis incidence, at 182 per 100,000 live births. Congenital syphilis involves the infection of a baby from a mother who is already infected.

Between 2017 and 2021, the congenital syphilis rate rose by 220% nationwide, while the rate skyrocketed by a staggering 6,641 percent in Mississippi, Dobbs said.

“Part of the reason for the continued spike is access to care. Another part is the pandemic preventing people from getting screened and the diversion of public resources needed to fight COVID. But research and modeling have shown us the increase preceded the pandemic. There’s been declining usage of condoms, plus available methods of birth control don’t necessarily prevent STIs,” he said.

UMMC will partner with a variety of clinics and community-based organizations across the state to enhance the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis in the general population. The Medical Center will also work with the Mississippi State Department of Health to ensure completion of treatment of syphilis patients and partner tracing.

“Syphilis cases are increasing across the board in the state,” said Dr. Victor Sutton, chief of community health and clinical services at the Mississippi State Department of Health. “MSDH is looking forward to working with the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s John D. Bower School of Population Health to end this threat to public health. We have a Syphilis Task Force in place that will spearhead data collection and educate providers and the community while also ensuring proper testing and treatment of individuals.”

In addition to a social media and advertising blitz throughout the state – targeting population centers such as metro Jackson, Hattiesburg and Desoto County as well as underserved populations in the Mississippi Delta – the initiative also aims to bring universal access to syphilis testing for all patients in the emergency room at the main campus and hopefully affiliate hospitals in Grenada and Holmes County, Dobbs said.

“Our emergency room physicians have been on the cutting edge of this sort of preventive health work in ERs for a while, especially with HIV and Hepatitis C,” Dobbs said. “Promoting universal syphilis screening in ERs has been a big conversation nationally within professional associations. Within certain characteristics of risk, some patients’ only access to the health care system is through the ER. They’re not getting regular checkups and certainly not thinking about syphilis routinely. But, what we see in cases where it’s diagnosed, we can see from their charts they were in the ER recently.”