Followup of Male and Female Contacts of Patients with Gonorrhea: Comparison of Epidemiologic Yield

Abstract

T HOUGH syphilis and gonorrhea have a common mode of spread, they do not yield to epidemiologic control measures in similar fashion. Lucas and associates (1) have pointed out several obstacles to satisfactory control of gonorrhea in women. We believe the most important of these is our inability to readily identify the asymptomatic female carrier of the disease. There are two principal ways in which such infected women may be located and brought to treatment. They can be named by men with recently diagnosed gonorrhea or they can be "accidentally" identified through routine screening programs. In either instance, is it of epidemiologic value to trace the chain of infection further by interviewing such patientsf How would casefinding compare with the results obtained from interviewing male gonorrhea patients? The opportunity to obtain such sta

Prostate involvement during sexually transmitted infections as measured by prostate-specific antigen concentration

“…This hypothesis is consistent with differences in the likelihood of symptoms for each STI. Approximately half of chlamydial infections are asymptomatic in men (Zimmerman et al , 1990), a large proportion of which are ultimately diagnosed in the military because of routine female screening, contact tracing, and self-referral for risky behaviours; 1–49% of gonorrhoeal infections present without symptoms (Pedersen and Harrah, 1970; Turner et al , 2002); and a likely even smaller proportion of diagnosed NCNGU infections present without symptoms because NCNGU is typically only investigated in men with urethral symptoms. An alternative explanation for null NCNGU findings, but not for differences between chlamydia and gonorrhoea, is that some NCNGU cases did not have an infectious aetiology.…”

27 years of uninterrupted contact tracing. The 'Tyneside Scheme'.

“…Nevertheless, all women with gonorrhoea, except selected patients such as innocently infected wives and fiancees, are interviewed in the social unit. Pedersen and Harrah (1970) found that 88-5 per cent. of 748 male contacts of women questioned were infected and that all but nineteen (2-5 per cent.)…”

Gonorrhea Control, United States, 1972–2015, A Narrative Review

“…Health department staff focused on finding female partners of symptomatic men because infected men were thought to almost always seek care, 7, 8 and male partners of female patients had often already been treated. 14 In 1973, the federal partner notification program interviewed 183,610 patients, which led to examination of 134,890 partners of whom 52,703 (39.1%) were brought to treatment for an infection, and a similar number of partners were treated for possible incubating infection. (Table 3) The partner notification program peaked in 1980 when 390,334 patients were interviewed (38.9% of the 1,004,029 total reported cases), 230,059 partners were examined and 85,338 (37.1%) infected partners were brought to treatment.…”