Syphilis Breaking Out In Oklahoma

Another Sexually Transmitted Disease on the rise:

Syphilis, the deadly sexually transmitted infection that can lead to blindness, paralysis and dementia, is returning here and around the country, another consequence of the heroin and methamphetamine epidemics, as users trade sex for drugs..

Syphilis has led them to members of 17 gangs; to drug dealers; to prostitutes, pimps and johns; and to their spouses and lovers, all caught in the disease’s undertow…

It took months for investigators to realize Oklahoma City had a syphilis outbreak. Last fall, the juvenile detention center reported three cases — a boy and two girls, the youngest, 14. The center had never had a syphilis case in seven years of testing for it…

Then, in February, a prison inmate tested positive. In interviews, he listed 24 sex partners — some his own, others the so-called pass-around girls for gangs, usually in exchange for heroin or methamphetamine…

Although syphilis still mostly afflicts gay and bisexual men who are African-American or Hispanic, in Oklahoma and nationwide, rates are rising among white women and their infants. Nearly five times as many babies across the country are born with syphilis as with H.I.V…

Nearly 24,000 cases of early-stage syphilis, when the disease is most contagious, were reported in the United States in 2015, the most recent data. That was a 19 percent rise over the previous year…

Ms. Williams was gentle but direct: “Your blood test results came back. It’s positive for syphilis.”

The woman buried her face in her hands. “I’m so embarrassed,” she sobbed. (Bound by confidentiality rules, Ms. Williams did not disclose her name.)

“Is that why my baby died?” she asked.

Ms. Williams nodded affirmatively…

The woman insisted she had slept with only two men that year — her boyfriend and her ex, the father of the baby who had died.

Ms. Williams, who knew the woman’s Facebook page revealed many friends in a gang central to the outbreak, asked her to think carefully about whether there were more…

Many people they sought are transient and use disposable phones…

Usually such efforts lead to sagas of unrelenting grimness: mothers who prostitute daughters, and men who forcibly inject runaways with drugs to hook them, a practice known as guerrilla pimping…

One victory: The woman from the trailer was in the waiting room. But she was alone. In the parking lot, her boyfriend sat out the appointment in his pickup truck, motor idling. He would not come inside for treatment.

He would almost certainly reinfect his girlfriend. And Ms. Williams would have to persuade her to be tested and treated, yet again.

Probably came in with migrants from El Salvador under Obama, hence the gang connection.

I have never liked Darwinian Selection. From a young age, I hated predators, and the strengthening of prey species that they performed. It is tough to describe the visceral, illogical buttons it pressed in my mind. And yet, without it the world’s species would have no majesty, and all the human virtue that makes the world great would not exist.

I do not much like the idea of diseases tearing through human populations either. And yet, look at the underworld it would erase from existence if allowed to run wild. Gang members forcibly injecting runaway girls with drugs, to addict them, so they can prostitute them out. Girls whose entire lives are lived in pain, going from drug hit to drug hit turning tricks to get them, and bearing stillborn children of ex’es conceived behind the backs of their current boyfriends, who themselves will happily re-infect their girlfriends. Innocent shooting victims who catch a bullet on the street meant for another gang member, and crime victims who just happen to be an opportunity for criminal enrichment. Brutality, and psychopathy, and overdoses, and ruined lives, and hurt girls, and betrayed loved ones. That entire world is all spontaneously erased by a little microbe, if left unchecked.

If you believe spirits inhabit bodies, and this type of cleansing of the gene pool produces better bodies which are less likely to go off the rails into such horror, then outbreaks like this create a better world for the spirits to come. More happiness, and opportunity, and safety, and love, and loyalty. And it all just happens, if left alone.

I can’t help but think of “His Kingdom come, His will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.” The world – all of it – is designed to head in that direction, no matter what we do.

So ironic, though. You try to suppress the disease and save people from themselves, and you make the world less happy and less good in the long run. It is just like you aid K and bring about r, while if you help r, you bring about K.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because nothing is all good or all bad