‘Silent Plague’ Infecting Millions of Women, NIH Director Warns

Society must break its silence to tackle a growing epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases afflicting millions of U.S. women, National Institutes of Health director Bernadine Healy said last week.

“Our society must confront this silent plague,” Healy, who plans to step down in June, said in a speech to a civic group here. “It is a plague of staggering proportions.”

Healy estimated that 6 million women a year in the United States contract a sexually transmitted disease (STD) and that many of these infections go undiagnosed and untreated because they are often harder to detect in women than they are in men.

“Even if they have symptoms, women with STDs often do not seek care, because these diseases in women still carry a tremendous stigma in many communities,” she said.

As a result, at least each year 1 million U.S. women who contract gonorrhea or chlamydia infections do not get treated in time and go on to develop a painful complication called pelvic inflammatory disease, or PID, the physician said.

In PID, the invading bacteria travel up the uterus and the Fallopian tubes into the abdomen, causing such severe scarring that one in four women who develop the infection lose their ability to bear children.

“These facts are particularly devastating when you consider that roughly 70% of women who develop PID are under the age of 25, and 75% have never had a child,” Healy said.

The number of women contracting the acquired IMmune deficiency syndrome, AIDS, is also growing rapidly and is now the fifth leading cause of premature death in women, she said.

Despite these numbers, she said that society still avoids talking candidly about sexually transmitted diseases in women.

“Today we can talk openly about sex, and women are free to be as sexually active as men, but no one wants to talk about the possible consequences of sex,” she said.

Healy said medical researchers are working to find ways to prevent and treat STDs, but research would provide only part of the answer. Society’s leaders must speak up, Healy said, “to shatter the silence that shrouds these diseases.”