How would a person know or suspect that he/she has contracted Syphilis? The signs and symptoms of Syphilis occur in four stages: primary, secondary, latent, and final or tertiary stage. There is an incubation period of 9 days to three months following contracting syphilis before an individual shows the first signs and symptoms of the disease.

The primary stage often begins with a sore, called a chancre, on the part that has been in contact with the infection, the genitals, rectum or mouth. The chancre feels like a button, firm, oval and round. Swelling of the glands in the groin may occur but is not usually sore or tender. One does not usually feel ill in the primary stage and the chancre heals after a few weeks without treatment. This is a problem because the syphilis is not gone. It continues to spread throughout the body.

The secondary stage can often occur after a gap of several weeks when the bacteria have spread through the body. At this stage one may begin to experience headaches, general aches and pains, sickness, loss of appetite and fever. Breaks in the skin occur and sometimes a dark red rash that can last for a few weeks or months. The rash appears on the backs of the legs, front of the arms, back, face, hands and feet. It does not itch and may be either raised or flat in appearance. Other symptoms in the secondary stage may also include sores in the mouth, nose, throat, genitals, or in the folds of the skin. Hair can fall out in patches. These signs and symptoms will disappear without treatment in 3 weeks to nine months, but the bacteria are still present in the body and the person still has syphilis.

The Latent Stage can last from a few months up to 50 years! There are no symptoms and after about two years the one infected ceases to be infectious.

About 30% of those who are not treated for their Syphilis will exhibit the final, or Tertiary Stage of disease. Common symptoms are painful, permanent ulcers on the skin, lesions on ligaments, joints and bones. Internal organs including the brain, nerves, eyes, heart, blood vessels, and liver may be damaged. As a result, infected persons might experience difficulty coordinating muscle movements, paralysis, blindness, numbness, dementia, insanity, and death (Mosby, 2008). Information such as this can be easily accessed by the public at sites such as About.com/Men’s Health or WebMd. However, while public sites such as these can be quite informative, individuals should not use them as their sole source of health information, and should seek professional advice and treatment through their primary medical provider or clinic at the first sign of symptoms.

Syphilis is far from a new disease. According to Leung-Chen (2008), Syphilis takes its name from a poem, Syphilis Sive Morbus Gallicus (translated as “Syphilis, or the French Disease”), by Girolamo Fracastoro, 1478-1553. In Fracastoro’s poem, a shepherd named Syphilis is stricken with a mysterious malady as divine punishment for insulting Apollo. Fracastoro also was first to propose a germ theory for the disease. The first well-documented outbreak of syphilis in Europe was in 1495, among soldiers fighting in the Italian War of 1494-1498. First to fall ill were Spanish troops sent to aid the kingdom of Naples against a multi national army of mercenaries fighting for the French. When the French army occupied Naples, the contagion quickly spread among them. Within two years, syphilis was rampant throughout Western Europe. By 1498, when it broke out in India, perhaps having been carried there by the explorer Vasco da Gama and his crewmen, it was pandemic. In 1505 it reached Canton, China. The origin of the disease was a matter of sharp debate, even as the pandemic spread. One mid-20th century writer, Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, put it this way: “As is usual in pandemics, each nation cast the blame on the preceding victim. To the Turks syphilis was the disease of the Christians, to the English it was the French Pox, to the French the Neopolitan disease, to the Italians the Spanish disease. Still, it wasn’t until 1905 that it’s causative organism, the spirochete bacterium Treponemapallidum, was first described by Fritz Schaudinn and Erich Hoffman in 1905. In 1913, Hideyo Noguchi proved that it causes the disease.

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