Pelvic inflammatory disease among women presenting to emergency rooms of hospitals in Massachusetts.

We obtained reports prospectively from the emergency rooms of 24 hospitals for 1 year. Nine percent of 3,505 women examined for genital infection with Neisseria gonorrhoeae were infected with this organism. Two thirds of the infected women had gonococcal pelvic inflammatory disease. The ratio of gonococcal PID to nongonococcal PID was 1:4.6 N. gonorrhoeae was isolated from 20% of women with PID in cities where the rate of all reported gonococcal infection was higher than the rate for the entire state (200 per 100,000 population). In contrast N. gonorrhoeae was isolated from only 13.4% of women with PID in cities with gonococcal infection rates lower than the rate for the state as a whole (p less than 0.01).