I heard Rush Limbaugh went deaf because of untreated Syphilis. Can this happen?
Syphilis can cause hearing loss, yes.
According to the sources I have found, if syphilis is left untreated and progresses to the tertiary stage it can cause deafness, among several other very serious complications. NIAID fact sheet Syphilis Fact Sheet
Beethoven may have gone deaf as a result of syphilis.
In his case though, wasn’t it inherited?
With Limbaugh, I believe it was from his drug abuse.
Can you speak up, please. I can’t hear you.
(Emphasis mine.)
Cite?
This is a bit of a hijack - but other than the Limbaugh rumor (which I’m skeptical about, until there’s a cite), are there many cases of people going without treatment for syphilis these days? My understanding is that it’s almost absurdly easy to treat. You take a course of penicillin, and you’re good.
Well, it’s not that easy to treat. More relevant, though, is the fact that many of the people who get syphilis tend to be people who either can’t get medical care or who refuse to seek/follow it.
Not sure what you mean by “it”, Guin. Which was inherited - the syphilis or the deafness? Or do you mean that both were, in the sense that the deafness was the result of congenital syph?
Early syphilis is fairly easy to treat. (For adults, benzathine penicillin G 2.4 million units IM in a single dose is all that is needed for primary and secondary cases.) The spirochetes are very sensitive to penicillin. They are also sensitive to several other common drugs such as tetracyclines, azalides, and cephalosporins. It is not uncommon to find people with positive serological tests for syphilis who have no evidence of disease and no recollection of every having been treated. It is likely that many of these people had syphilis, didn’t notice any symptoms, and were cured at some point when they took antibiotics for another reason (e.g., bronchitis, gonorrhea, acne, etc.)
Neurosyphilis is extremely rare these days in the U.S. (so rare, apparently, that no one has recently ventured to guess the incidence). One reason is that most infections are treated before neurosyphilis develops, another is that neurosyphilis only develops in a fraction of untreated patients.
Neurosyphilis is more complicated to treat, but hardly requires heroics: Aqueous crystalline penicillin G 18–24 million units per day, administered as 3–4 million units IV every 4 hours or continuous infusion, for 10–14 days or, if compliance with therapy can be ensured, procaine penicillin 2.4 million units IM once daily plus probenecid 500 mg orally four times a day, both for 10–14 days.
People love to claim that anyone they don’t like who exhibits any neurological or behavioral quirk suffers from tertiary syphilis (e.g., Idi Amin) but, although it makes a nice rumor, it is very unlikely to be true in our age.
Sorry, I meant syphilis. Should have noted that.
I imagine the reasons why someone would go untreated=shame, embarassment, denial.
Well, if we’re still talking about Beethoven, the contemporary treatment consisted of meds containing mercury, or else having a rod inserted up along the whole length of the urethra. It was probably better to go untreaed back then. Poor guy, so unfair… got the disease without having the fun.
Syphilis can be hard to diagnose though, which would be why there are still some people who get to the tertiary stage today. People just don’t know what the early signs of infection are, and the chancre is painless and can form inside the body and go unnoticed.
EEEEP!!!
:eek:
In 1978 I worked as a nursing home aide in a home in the suburbs of Philly.
There was a man on my floor who was dying of syphillis.
It was simply horrible to witness. The disease had progressed so far that by the time he was admitted into a home, there was nothing to do as far as treatment.
I quit before he died. Thank god.
I thought that that was a treatment for gonorrhea, which can seal the urethra shut with infection. I was under the impression that the main symptom of primary syphillis was a localized sore, and that syphillis passed from parent to child would not usually manifest itself in the genitals. By the way, the tubing treatment for gonorrhea is not such an old treatment at that. I know of someone who had to have it done in the late 1950s.
I am reading *Guns, Germs and Steel * right now (I am only a decade behind the Dope’s best and brightest), and just read that the first confirmed case of syphilis was in 1495, and that in the early years/decades/centuries it was a much more dangerous disease than it is now. For example, the old woman in Hogarth’s pictures “The Harlot’s Progress” is missing her nose due to syphilis, because the disease used to make chunks of flesh fall off (sort of like the classic idea of leprosy). The germ eventually evolved to cause less damage to its host, therefore living longer and having more chances to spread itself.
re: beethoven and syph…i thought that kids who had deafness as a result of syph were born that way. His hearing loss might have been the result of syphillis, but he could also have had this form of progressive bone conductive deafness that usually starts around young adult hood. For some reason i’m blanking on the name…one of my friends who’s a music geek told me that he used a bone conduction aid to hear.
Has this been definitively decided yet? There still seems to be a good deal of discussion between the two schools of thought on it’s origins.
As for it being a lot more dangerous then than now, I would have thought in the sixteenth century anything that lead to skin sores or lesions would have a pretty high likelihood of secondary infections or ulceration. Untreated syphilis is still a very nasty disease, even with soap, clean water and disinfectant readily available.