City Makes Progress In Fight Against Syphilis BALTIMORE, MD (wypr) - AMBI, STREET NOISE, TRACK 99 @ 00:03, RUN UNDER SCRIPT
On a Thursday Afternoon, Abdul Jameel walks up and down the street at the corner of East Baltimore and Highland Avenue, recruiting people to get tested for syphilis and HIV.
Homeboy you know we're doing free testing we're giving out the free gift cards homeboy. 01:40
Jameel works for the Baltimore City Health Department. He's part of a concentrated effort to reduce the incidence of syphilis and HIV corner-by-corner, by taking testing to the streets.
Through its mobile outreach vans, the city's Health Department brings testing services to around 12- to 14,000 people a year. Many of these people are addicts, prostitutes, or others who have little contact with the health care system.
What we try to do is to service the people in the neighborhood, because a lot of them can't get to no clinic. So, when you bring the clinic to them there should be no excuse, of not getting tested. But a lot of people still won't get tested. [del] My job is to encourage them to get tested. 02:38
Syphilis is especially hard because you often don't know you have it.

Syphilis is the number one disease in Baltimore City, along with HIV. And then it's a hidden symptom, that you don't even know you have it. Until you start breaking out in your hands, and your hair starts falling out. So, that's why we target syphilis because it's one of those hidden diseases. [del] A lot of people won't get tested in the clinics, but they'll get tested in the vans. 02:56

The city sends out one or two vans a day to neighborhoods where people are at high-risk for syphilis and HIV. Often these are areas with a high concentration of drug use and prostitution. Syphilis rates are also high among men who have sex with men, so the vans frequently park outside clubs or parks where men meet to have sex.

When we first encounter a site, we investigate the area, you know what I mean, just to see how it's going. Now this is a high-risk area right here, and it's also a hot spot for crack cocaine, heroin and whatever else you do. 00:40

Ten years ago, the country was at an all-time low for syphilis and the Center for Disease Control thought it might be possible to eradicate the disease in the U.S. completely. But there were some problem spots, including Baltimore, which had 466 cases of syphilis, the highest rate in the country.
Working closely with the CDC, the city's health department developed an aggressive outreach program, says Dr. Charlene Brown, Assistant Commissioner of Clinical Services for the Department of Health.
The team here developed a very aggressive and intensive outreach effort. We called down our colleagues from CDC to help us. The team worked very closely, going out into the street, reaching out to people, expanding the testing, making sure to do detailed interviews with the people they found [del] to have syphilis [del] to learn more about where are the neighborhoods, what are the venues that we should be going to try and reach people to be able to get people treated with this very curable disease.
Through its efforts, the city's syphilis rate has decreased about 75-percent in the last 10 years.
But keeping the number of cases down continues to prove a challenge in Baltimore and nationwide.
Despite the lower rates and almost half a million dollars the city spends a year on STD outreach, Baltimore still ranks in the top 10 nationwide for syphilis. And the country as a whole is seeing an increase, particularly among men who have sex with men.
But Dr. Brown remains optimistic that the city's street-level attack will continue to have an impact.
I'm Natasha Lesser, reporting in East Baltimore, for 88-1, WYPR.
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