Examining the impact of federally-funded syphilis elimination activities in the USA.

In 1999, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a national syphilis elimination plan. Using state-level syphilis incidence data from 1997 to 2005, we found that greater amounts of state-level funding for syphilis elimination in a given year were associated with lower state-level syphilis rates in subsequent years. The findings suggest that federally-funded syphilis elimination activities are having a notable impact on syphilis rates. The recent increases in syphilis in the United States might have been much more pronounced had there been no syphilis elimination activities.