A $145,000 campaign to promote syphilis awareness and prevention is getting people's attention, officials say, with a growing number of people visiting an information website and calling a hotline number featured on hard-to-miss posters throughout the city.

"We're trying to make it part of a whole health campaign…we want people to get tested," said Laurie Anderson, syphilis elimination coordinator for the Chicago Department of Public Health.

The campaign, launched in July in response to a high number of reported cases, is the project of the Syphilis Elimination Task Force, a partnership between the Chicago public health department and community members.

Posters announcing that "syphilis is back" are plastered across CTA buses, Red Line stations, and businesses between downtown and Evanston, an area where most reported cases have been clustered, according to Beau Gratzer, director of HIV/STD prevention at the Howard Brown Clinic in Lakeview.

The posters, which include the hotline number and a website address, are not going unnoticed. According to Anderson,  visits to the website have jumped from approximately 600 a day to about 800 a day since they went up.

The posters are also generating more calls to the state's HIV/AIDS and STD hotline. Hotline coordinator Jill Dispenza said 51 people called after seeing the bus signs in July, compared to three in June. The hotline receives 1,500 calls a month.

The task force is also working to target its message to reflect the sexually-transmitted disease's increasing prevalence among men who have sex with men. Information tables have been set up at the Pride Parade and Northhalsted Market Days.

A nationwide anti-syphilis effort began in 2003 in response to an outbreak that began two years earlier, concentrated among men living in major metropolitan areas who had sex with other men, Gratzer said.

Chicago was one of eight cities to receive a special grant of nearly $1 million from the Centers for Disease Control. The campaign ran from October 2003 through 2004, according to Anderson.

It is too soon to say whether the current campaign will result in fewer cases. In 2006, the last year for which figures are available, the health department recorded 295 cases, down from a peak of 418 cases in 2005. Despite the decline, the numbers were still high enough to place the city in "outbreak" status, Anderson said.

In 2003, the year in which the lowest number of new cases was recorded since the outbreak began, there were 267  cases.

Nationwide, the CDC has reported 6,440 new cases of syphilis so far this year, up from 6,100 in 2006.

 Health officials say the surge in new cases is particularly disturbing because the CDC had thought the disease, which is easily treated with antibiotics, was almost eliminated. According to a CDC report, prevalence was so low in 1998 that the disease was expected to be classified as eradicated by 2005.
 
While easily treated, syphilis is not easily detected, health officials say, characterized by symptoms that can go unnoticed or are mistaken for other ailments.

Approximately one-third of those infected develop symptoms of late syphilis, which can cause mental illness, blindness, heart disease and even death, according to a Chicago Department of Health release.

"People can walk around with syphilis and not even know it," said Bill Schaffner, a doctor and member of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

The campaign's main goal is "to make people aware that syphilis is an issue in Chicago" and that testing should be part of routine health screenings, Gratzer said.

A number of clinics throughout the city offer free, confidential testing with blood results available within 15 days. A list of clinics and their hours of operation can be found at www.gettestedchicago.com.

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