Amid the greatest world health medical challenge, enforced by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Calendar of the History of Syphilis comes to light, supported by numerous governmental, academic, and civil society organizations and led by the factotum from the study of sexually transmitted diseases in Brazil, our friend Professor Mauro Romero Leal Passos.This Calendar exposes, in an elegant and illustrated way, a detailed historiographical description of the saga of syphilis throughout its relation with humanity, presented in a ludic way, in a yearbook that daily reinforces the importance of this timeless disease: it is as old as it is current. However, given the medical-social drama laid out by COVID-19, an unsuspecting event, inopportunely and decontextualized, is the emergence of this launch amidst the on-going pandemic.The present editorial aims to highlight the importance of initiatives in the field of medical history for the full understanding of syphilis, whose teachings can transcend the pathology and clarify the entire understanding of the health-disease process, fundamental at a time in which medicine has the greatest challenge of the last century, perhaps of the entire existence.
SYPHILIS: GENERALITIESSyphilis is determined by bacterial infection of the Treponema pallidum, a sexually transmitted spirochete. Despite having well established treatment since the 1940s, thanks to the studies of Sir. Alexander Fleming and the uses of penicillin (1) , roughly 45 million people are estimated to be infected by this disease in the world, with an incidence of six million new cases/year, causing the death of approximately 100,000 people annually (2)(3)(4)(5) . This scenario becomes more dramatic when we compare more than 200,000 fetal deaths from untreated congenital syphilis in the world, which accounts for about 25 to 40% of fetal deaths index (6,7) . Understanding the reasons involved in the high prevalence and incidence of a preventable, curable, and eradicable disease may provide strategies for public health action to deal with other infectious conditions, including COVID-19.
Participation of each authorAntonio Braga: publication theme, bibliographic review, writing of the text, review for sending the paper.João Pedro Cortes: review for sending the paper. Caroline Pritsivelis: bibliographic review, review for sending the paper.Lybio Martire Junior: bibliographic review, writing of the text, review for sending the paper.