Rates of Primary and Secondary Syphilis Among White and Black Non-Hispanic Men Who Have Sex With Men, United States, 2014.
Grey J,Bernstein K,Sullivan P,Kidd S,Gift T,Hall E,Hankin-Wei A,Weinstock H,Rosenberg E

Rates of Primary and Secondary Syphilis Among White and Black Non-Hispanic Men Who Have Sex With Men, United States, 2014.

Journal of AIDS | November 2017

This work was presented at the 2017 International Society for Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research Conference (ISSTDR) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Background: Men who have sex with men (MSM) in the United States experience an approximately 100-fold greater rate of primary and secondary (P&S) syphilis diagnoses compared with men who have sex with women only. As in the general population, racial/ethnic disparities in P&S syphilis diagnosis rates may exist among MSM, but MSM-specific P&S syphilis rates by race/ethnicity are unavailable. We enhanced a published modeling approach to estimate area-level MSM populations by race/ethnicity and provide the first estimates of P&S syphilis among black and white non-Hispanic MSM.

Methods: We used data from the American Community Survey (ACS), published findings from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), and national syphilis surveillance data to estimate state-level rates of P&S syphilis diagnoses among MSM, overall and for black and white non-Hispanic MSM. We also used variability around ACS and NHANES estimates to calculate 95% confidence intervals for each rate.

Results: Among 11,359 cases of P&S syphilis among MSM with known race/ethnicity in 2014, 72.5% were among white (40.3%) or black (32.2%) MSM. The national rate of P&S syphilis diagnosis was 168.4/100,000 for white MSM and 583.9/100,000 for black MSM. Regional rates for black MSM ranged from 602.0/100,000 (South) to 521.5/100,000 (Midwest) and were consistently higher than those for white MSM.

Conclusions: Although white MSM accounted for more P&S syphilis diagnoses than black MSM in 2014, when evaluating diagnoses based on rate per 100,000, black MSM had consistently and markedly higher rates than white MSM, with the highest impacted states located in the US South.

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Downloadable Files:
Estimated number of MSM, by race_ethnicity and US geographic area, 2014.xlsx

Rates of PS syphilis in MSM by state and race - ISSTDR 2017_0.pdf


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This work is supported by The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [Grant # 1 1 NU38PS004650]

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