Bay Biosciences provides high-quality biopsy tissue samples, formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue blocks, with matched fresh frozen sera (serum), plasma, and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) bio-fluids, from patients diagnosed with Syphilis.
The sera (serum), plasma and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) biofluid specimens are processed from patients peripheral whole-blood using customized collection and processing protocols from Syphilis.
Fresh frozen tissue and matched biofluid samples were, collected from unique patients diagnosed with Syphilis.
Bio-samples are provided to a valued pharmaceutical customer for research, diagnostics, discovery, and drug development.
Syphilis Infection Overview
Syphilis is a highly contagious sexually transmitted bacterial infection (STI) caused by a type of bacteria known as Treponema pallidum. It spreads via unprotected sex with an infected person. Syphilis can have very serious complications when left untreated.
It is a highly contagious disease that’s mostly spread through sexual activity, including oral and anal sex. The infected person often doesn’t know that they have the disease and passes it on to their sexual partner.
Syphilis is divided into stages (primary, secondary, latent, and tertiary). There are different signs and symptoms associated with each stage.
Men account for the most cases of syphilis, with the vast majority of those cases occurring among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. The rate of women with syphilis has been declining in the United States,
According to the center for disease control and prevention (CDC) in 2019 129,813 cases were reported in the United States. Rates increased among both males and females by 11.2% during 2018-2019, in all regions of the United States, and among all racial/ethnicity groups.
The first sign of syphilis is a small, painless sore. It can appear on the skin or mucous membranes of the vagina, anus, rectum, lips, or inside the mouth. This sore is called a chancre and usually it doesn’t itch. Most people often fail to notice it right away.
These sores resolve on their own. However, if a person does not receive treatment, the bacteria remain in the body. They can remain dormant in the body for decades before reactivating and damaging organs, including the brain.
Syphilis is most likely to spread during oral, anal, or vaginal sexual activity. People rarely pass the bacteria on through kissing.
Syphilis can be challenging to diagnose. Someone can have it without showing any symptoms for years. However, the earlier syphilis is discovered, the better. Syphilis that remains untreated for a long time can cause major damage to important organs, like the heart and brain.
Syphilis is only spread through direct contact with syphilitic chancres. It can’t be transmitted by sharing a toilet with another person, wearing another person’s clothing, or using another person’s eating utensils.
Stages of Syphilis Infection
Syphilis is divided into stages. There are different signs and symptoms associated with each stage.
Following are the four stages of syphilis infection:
- Primary
- Secondary
- Latent
- Tertiary
Syphilis is most infectious in the first two stages, which is primary stage and secondary stage.
When syphilis is in the hidden, or latent, stage, the disease remains active but often with no symptoms. Tertiary syphilis is the most destructive to health.
Other types of syphilis include:
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Latent syphilis. The infection doesn’t have any noticeable symptoms but is still in your body.
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Congenital syphilis. Pregnant women with the disease can spread it to their baby. It can harm the baby and even cause death.
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Neurosyphilis. The infection can spread to your brain or spinal cord. You might get headaches, dementia, depression, or numbness or become paralyzed. You could have a hard time controlling your muscles.
Signs and Symptoms of Syphilis Infection
Primary Syphilis
The primary stage of syphilis occurs about three to four weeks after a person contracts the bacteria. It begins with a small, round sore called a chancre. A chancre is painless, but it’s highly infectious. This sore may appear wherever the bacteria entered the body, such as on or inside the mouth, genitals, or rectum.
On average, the sore shows up around three weeks after infection, but it can take between 10 and 90 days (3 weeks on average) after you’re exposed to the disease. The sore remains for anywhere between two to six weeks.
Syphilis is transmitted by direct contact with a sore. This usually occurs during sexual activity, including oral sex.
Secondary Syphilis
This stage begins 6 weeks to 6 months after a person is exposed to syphilis infection, and It may last 1 to 3 months.
Patients with secondary syphilis usually get a rosy “copper penny” rash on the palms of their hands and soles of their feet. They may also have different rashes on other parts of their body.
These may look like rashes caused by other diseases. Patients may have moist, wart-like, lesions in their groin, white patches on the inside of their mouth, swollen lymph nodes, fever, fatigue, hair loss, stress and weight loss weight loss.
As with primary syphilis, symptoms of secondary syphilis will get better without treatment.
Skin rashes and a sore throat may develop during the second stage of syphilis. The rash won’t itch and is usually found on the infected patients palms and soles, but it may occur anywhere on the body. Some people don’t notice the rash before it goes away.
Other symptoms of secondary syphilis may include:
- Anxiety
- Aching joints
- Headaches
- Fatigue
- Fever
- Hair loss
- Stress
- Swollen lymph nodes
- Unexplained weight loss
These symptoms will go away whether or not treatment is received. However, without treatment, a person still has syphilis.
Secondary syphilis is often mistaken for another condition.
Latent Syphilis
The third stage of syphilis is the latent, or hidden, stage. The primary and secondary symptoms disappear, and there won’t be any noticeable symptoms at this stage. However, the bacteria remain in the body. This stage could last for years before progressing to tertiary syphilis.
Tertiary Syphilis
If the syphilis infection isn’t treated, it may move on to a stage marked by severe problems with the heart, brain, and nerves. You could become paralyzed, blind, or deaf, or get dementia, depression or impotence. It can even be deadly.
The last stage of infection is tertiary syphilis. According to the Mayo Clinic, approximately 15% to 30% of patients infected with syphilis who don’t get treatment will develop complications known as tertiary syphilis.
Tertiary syphilis can occur years or decades after the initial infection. Tertiary syphilis can be life-threatening. Some other potential outcomes of tertiary syphilis include:
- Blindness
- Deafness
- Destruction of soft tissue and bone
- Mental illness
- Memory loss
- Neurological disorders, such as stroke or meningitis
- Heart disease
- Neurosyphilis, which is an infection of the brain or spinal cord
Diagnosis of Syphilis Infection
Your doctor will need to do a physical exam. They might give you following tests:
- Blood tests. A quick test at your doctor’s office or at the hospital can diagnose syphilis.
- Cerebrospinal fluid tests. If your doctor thinks you might have neurosyphilis, they’ll test fluid taken from around your spinal cord.
- Darkfield microscopy. Syphilis bacteria are visible through a microscope in fluid taken from a skin sore or lymph node.
Treatment of Syphilis Infection
Syphilis is curable with quick diagnosis and treatment. Primary and secondary syphilis are easy to treat with a penicillin injection.
Penicillin is one of the most widely used antibiotics and is usually effective in treating syphilis. Patients who are allergic to penicillin will likely be treated with a different antibiotic, such as the following:
- Azithromycin
- Ceftriaxone
- Doxycycline
If you have neurosyphilis, you’ll get daily doses of penicillin intravenously. This will often require a brief hospital stay.
Unfortunately, the damage caused by late syphilis can’t be reversed. The bacteria can be killed, but treatment will most likely focus on easing pain and discomfort.
During treatment, make sure to avoid sexual contact until all sores on your body are healed and your doctor tells you it’s safe to resume sex. If you’re sexually active, your partner should be treated as well. Don’t resume sexual activity until you and your partner have completed treatment.
Complications of Syphilis Infection
If the infected patient doesn’t get treatment, syphilis can have complications all over the body:
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Small Bumps: Bumps called gummas can grow on your skin, bones, or organs. They can destroy the tissue around them.
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Nervous System Problems: Syphilis can cause problems like headaches, meningitis, brain damage, paralysis, or hearing and vision loss.
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Cardiovascular Problems: The disease can damage the heart valves or cause bulging blood vessels (aneurysms) or an inflamed aorta (aortitis).
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HIV: Syphilis can increase your chance of getting HIV.
Syphilis and Pregnancy
The CDC says women should be tested for syphilis at least once during pregnancy. It’s best if they’re tested at their first prenatal visit.
Depending on how long pregnant women have had syphilis, they have a high chance of stillbirth (birth of an infant who has died before delivery) or of giving birth to a baby who dies shortly after birth.
An infected baby may be born without symptoms but could have them within a few weeks if the disease isn’t treated right away.
These signs and symptoms can be very serious. Untreated babies may have delays in their development, have seizures, or die.
Jarisch-Herxheimer Reaction
The Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction is an acute febrile reaction frequently accompanied by headache, myalgia, and fever that can occur within the first 24 hours after the initiation of any syphilis therapy.
It is a reaction to treatment and not an allergic reaction to penicillin. Patients should be informed about this possible adverse reaction and how to manage it if it occurs.
The Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction occurs most frequently among persons who have early syphilis, presumably because bacterial loads are higher during these stages.
Management of Sex Partners
Sexual transmission of T. pallidum is thought to occur only when mucocutaneous syphilitic lesions are present. Such manifestations are uncommon after the first year of infection.
Persons exposed through sexual contact with a person who has primary, secondary, or early latent syphilis should be evaluated clinically and serologically and treated according to the following recommendations:
- Persons who have had sexual contact with an infected person who receives a diagnosis of primary, secondary, or early latent syphilis less than 90 days before the diagnosis should be treated presumptively for early syphilis, even if serologic test results are negative.
- Long-term sex partners of persons who have late latent syphilis should be evaluated clinically and serologically for syphilis and treated on the basis of the evaluation’s findings.
HIV Infection
Persons with HIV infection who have primary or secondary syphilis should be treated similarly to those without HIV (see Syphilis Among Persons with HIV Infection).
Patients with syphilis have a significantly increased chance of contracting HIV. The sores the disease cause make it easier for HIV to enter the body.
It’s also important to note that those with HIV may experience different syphilis symptoms than those who don’t have HIV. If you have HIV, talk to your doctor about how to recognize syphilis symptoms.
Testing for Syphilis Infection
The first stage of syphilis can easily go undetected. The symptoms in the second stage are also common symptoms of other illnesses. This means that if any of the following applies to a person, they should consider getting tested for syphilis even if they don’t have any symptoms.
A person should get tested if they had any of the following:
- Are pregnant
- Had unprotected sex (without a condom) with someone who have syphilis
- A man who have sex with men
- Have unprotected sex (without condom) with multiple partners
- Are in prison
- Have a partner who have unprotected sex (without condom) with multiple people
- Are a sex worker
If the syphilis test comes back positive, it’s important for the infected person to complete the full treatment. Infected person must finish the full course of antibiotics, even if their symptoms disappear. Also avoid all sexual activity until your doctor tells you that it’s safe to do so. An infected person should also get tested for HIV as well.
Patients who have tested positive for syphilis should notify all of their recent sexual partners so that they can also get tested and get treatment.
Bay Biosciences is a global leader in providing researchers with high quality, clinical grade, fully characterized human tissue samples, bio-specimens, and human bio-fluid collections.
Samples available include cancer (tumor) tissue, cancer serum, cancer plasma, cancer, peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC). and human tissue samples from most other therapeutic areas and diseases.
Bay Biosciences maintains and manages its own biorepository, the human tissue bank (biobank) consisting of thousands of diseased samples (specimens) and from normal healthy donors available in all formats and types.
Our biobank procures and stores fully consented, deidentified and institutional review boards (IRB) approved human tissue samples and matched controls.
All our human tissue collections, human specimens and human bio-fluids are provided with detailed, samples associated patient’s clinical data.
This critical patient’s clinical data includes information relating to their past and current disease, treatment history, lifestyle choices, biomarkers, and genetic information.
Patient’s data is extremely valuable for researchers and is used to help identify new effective treatments (drug discovery & development) in oncology, and other therapeutic areas and diseases.
Bay Biosciences banks wide variety of human tissue samples and biological samples, including cryogenically preserved at – 80°C.
Including fresh frozen tissue samples, tumor tissue samples, formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE), tissue slides, with matching human bio-fluids, whole blood and blood-derived products such as serum, plasma and PBMC.
Bay Biosciences is a global leader in collecting and providing human tissue samples according to the specified requirements and customized, tailor-made collection protocols.
Please contact us anytime to discuss your special research projects and customized human tissue sample requirements.
Bay Biosciences provides human tissue samples (human specimens) from diseased and normal healthy donors which includes:
- Peripheral whole-blood
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In addition to the standard processing protocols, Bay Biosciences can also provide human plasma, serum, and PBMC bio-fluid samples using custom processing protocols; you buy donor-specific collections in higher volumes and specified sample aliquots from us.
Bay Biosciences also provides human samples from normal healthy donors; volunteers, for controls and clinical research, contact us Now.
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