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Across the country, physicians, clinic staff and public health experts say that a treatment shortage is preventing them from reining in a surge of syphilis and that the federal government is downplaying the crisis. State and local public health authorities, which by law are responsible for controlling the spread of infectious diseases, report delays getting medicine to pregnant people with syphilis. This emergency was predictable: There have been shortages of this drug in eight of the last 20 years. Yet federal health authorities have not prevented the drug shortages in the past and aren’t doing much to prevent them in the future. (Barry-Jester, 3/4)

Rates of chlamydia and syphilis dropped dramatically among men who have sex with men and transgender women after San Francisco began offering them prescriptions for antibiotics to take after having unprotected sex, according to a report released Monday. The preliminary report, shared at the international Conference for Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver, could have a tremendous impact on how the United States approaches soaring rates of sexually transmitted infections nationwide, researchers said. (Allday, 3/4)

Since its last update on February 23, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week reported 6 more measles cases, raising the nation's total so far this year to 41. Against a backdrop of rising global activity this winter, measles infections in the first months of the year are gaining quickly on the 58 cases the CDC reported for all of 2023. (Schnirring, 3/4)

At least six Brazilian states in addition to the Federal District are facing dengue epidemics and 17 cities have declared a state of emergency as the country has already registered 1 million cases of dengue in the first two months of 2024, more than half the 1.6 million cases confirmed last year — which was already almost 18% higher than in 2022. ... As a result, Brazil's public health-care system, known as SUS, has been grappling to keep up, resorting to field hospitals like the one in Brasília and tents in strategic points around its cities to triage patients with suspected cases of dengue. (Langlois, 3/4)

The mosquito's ability to adapt to changing temperatures may be contributing to the spread of diseases, like dengue fever, Zika virus, and chikungunya virus. “We've been interested in climate change for awhile trying to understand why we get more disease in one location than another. And how these patterns of risk might change, as climate warms,” said Matthew Thomas, the director of the Invasion Science Research Institute within the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Science. (Meszaros, 3/4)