Why hasn’t a syphilis vaccine been developed for so many years?

When AIDS was first discovered, the medical community knew very little about it, and infected people could only be tortured to death by the disease. In the 30 years from the discovery of AIDS cases in 1981 to 2011, the disease has claimed 30 million lives, according to the World Health Organization. As of the end of June 2011, approximately 64 million people in the world were infected with HIV, with an average of 7,000 new cases every day. Approximately 1,800 babies are born with HIV in the world. There are only two recognized AIDS patients in the world.

Until the dawn of the end of 1995, the invention and widespread application of cocktail therapy invented by Chinese-American scientist Dayi Ho delayed the onset of illness for most infected people and greatly reduced the mortality rate.

He Dayi was born in Taipei City, Taiwan Province in 1952, and his ancestral home is Hejia Village, Songlin, Xiacun Town, Xinyu County, Jiangxi Province. When he was 12 years old, he immigrated to Los Angeles with his family. In 1978, he received his MD from MIT and Harvard Medical School. As one of the first scientists in the world to realize that AIDS is caused by a virus, He Dayi and his colleagues are committed to research on combination antiviral therapies, known as cocktail therapy. The first difficulty in developing a syphilis vaccine is based on its special biological characteristics: humans are its only host and cannot survive without the human body.

Therefore, Treponema pallidum is difficult to culture in vitro, and rabbits in living containers can quickly remove the virus. This brings difficulties to the research of Treponema pallidum.

Preventable: Syphilis is a disease mainly spread through sex and blood. As long as it is kept clean, the probability of infection is almost very small and it is a preventable disease.

Curable: As a sexually transmitted bacterium, Treponema pallidum can be cured with antibiotics such as penicillin and minocycline. Penicillin has been used to treat syphilis for more than 70 years, and no resistance has developed.

Syphilis is a socially curable disease. It is highly controllable and curable, making the development of a syphilis vaccine less necessary and urgent.

Generally speaking, the most important thing to stay away from syphilis is to clean yourself up and have regular physical examinations. If unfortunately infected, the first active treatment can cure it.