Infamous throughout history as one of the most unpleasant, harmful, and silent of sexually transmitted diseases, Syphilis remains a major health issue in the world's most neglected and troubled regions. Although now relatively rare in the United States, with approximately 36,000 cases reported a year and only around 30 fatalities, an estimated 492,000 infants in Sub-Saharan Africa die each year from congenital syphilis [2].
Syphilis presents a severe diagnostic challenge to healthcare workers around the world, due to the broad and inconclusive nature of its symptoms. Furthermore, this “great imitator” of a disease can also remain unnoticed in infected people for years, thus helping it spread from person to person through sexual contact. Because of this, effective and cheap syphilis screening is essential to its erradication.
Error creating thumbnail: File missingFig. 1 The syphilis bacterium, treponema pallidum attaching to a testicular cell. Source: The Encyclopedia Britannica, online.
