The largest outbreak of syphilis in Genesee County in years is beginning to wane, officials say.

“Based upon the diagrams I have seen so far,” said Genesee County Health Department spokesman Mark Valacak in a phone interview with Michigan Messenger, “the outbreak has already peaked, and we are on the downslide.”

Valacak said this outbreak underscores a behavioral study done by the department last year. The study, he said, showed that over 50 percent of respondents in Genesee County did not use a condom the first time they were with a partner. He said this is contributing to the syphilis outbreak.

“We try to do a good job of educating people about this,” he said. “The only way you can be certain is about yourself. You can’t be sure your partner is monogamous.”

In addition, he said the disease appears to be on a “downslide” because of public awareness of the outbreak and educational outreach programs.

Officials have confirmed 70 cases of the bacterial infection so far this year. That is a 400-percent increase over cases reported in all of 2007. The youngest person infected this year was 17 years old, but the majority of cases were among people in their 30s to 40s. An immediate breakdown of genders for the outbreak was not available, Valacak said, because a majority of the cases had been diagnosed by private physicians, not through the traditional sexually transmitted disease clinics.

The outbreak appears to have been mostly in heterosexuals and the commercial sex worker populations of Flint, Valacak said. Three of the cases were co-infected with HIV as well. A breakdown of the other sexually transmitted diseases that the cases might have been co-infected with was not available, Valacak said.

The outbreak began late this spring, and since that time the GCHD has been working with local media outlets, health care providers, particularly OB/GYNs and dermatologists; and the health department has gone into several areas with mobile testing. The mobile testing has not discovered any cases of syphilis, but it did find cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and the parasitic infection trichomoniasis.

The health department is also working closely with police and the court system to make commercial sex workers charged with prostitution get tested for syphilis as well, Valacak said.

In addition to this, the department has brought in experts from Detroit, which handled a similar outbreak several years ago, to assist in training GCHD staff on how to do outreach to clients most at risk, particularly commercial sex workers.