This morning, I was reading in my local paper about some city officials giving themselves a 12% raise in addition to a bonus that is more than I currently make at my job. Naturally, I began to wonder a) how my boss would react if I had a talk with him about increasing my salary by 100% and b) how to secure one of those city jobs should the talk with my boss not go as intended and I got fired on principle alone. But, I digress. When the economy starts to go up and people begin to make more money, I always wonder what they choose to start spending their money on. Some people put the money aside for retirement, children’s college funds or just for a rainy day. Others on the other side of the money spectrum simply start spending their money more frivolously on high-end electronics, expensive gifts and clothes. In some parts of China, the recent economic boom had some unexpected side effects, literally. Over the past ten years, the number of cases of syphilis has grown tenfold. The reason behind the dramatic increase of this sexually transmitted disease according to Chinese health officials is the fact that as migrant workers received an increase in their take-home pay, they decided a good way to use up that extra money was to hire more prostitutes. Before the 1980s in China, syphilis had been almost completely wiped out. According to Chen Xiangsheng, the deputy director of China’s National Center for Sexually Transmitted Diseases Control, the disease reemerged in the 1980s and has since grown steadily by approximately 30% year after year. He stated that last year alone, 278,215 cases of syphilis were reported. Chen went on to say, “We know that the resurgence of syphilis was driven by prostitution, migration of workers and poor health controls. The areas with higher syphilis prevalence are usually places where the economy is booming but where there is also greater economic inequality, such as the southeastern coastal areas.” Syphilis is a bacterial infection that causes the person who contracts it to develop sores and rashes. While it is capable of being easily treated with a series of antibiotics, it can have severe side effects if the patient does not treat it immediately. Severe side effects of the disease include damage to both the nervous system and the heart. Chen stated that China is still in the process of creating new initiatives and policies that can be put in place to both treat and prevent these types of sexually transmitted diseases.

Original Source of Syphilis on the Rise in China