BALTIMORE — According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Baltimore has the highest sexually transmitted disease in the country.
Charm City moved up to the top spot after checking in at No. 6 in last year’s survey, conducted by Innerbody.com.
Philadelphia is No. 3 on this year’s list, just behind second-ranked Jackson, Mississippi.
San Francisco and Montgomery, Alabama round out the top five.
According to the survey, Baltimore has a reported 2,004 STD cases per every 100,000 people. There were 7,636 cases of chlamydia, 4,231 cases of gonorrhea, 207 cases of HIV, and 210 cases of syphilis.
The CDC says 2.4 million cases of STDs were reported in 2018. However, symptoms of STDs can be hard to detect, so that number does not reflect the total number of infections. And other STDs — such as HIV and syphilis — can be active inside the body before signs of the infection become apparent.
Therefore, these statistics do not include the thousands of people who currently have an STD, but do not know it, Innerbody.com says.
All of the STD data found in the report, including case statistics for HIV, syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia, are from the CDC’s latest data release from October 2019, Innerbody said.
Syphilis data includes only primary and secondary syphilis cases and does not include congenital and early latent syphilis cases. HIV cases are not reported for some cities. Statistics for other relatively common STDs, such as herpes, are not collected by the CDC at this time and hence are left out of the analysis.
All estimated metro area and state population data is from the CDC and the US Census Bureau.
The rankings include city metro areas with an estimated population of 150,000 or more, according to Innerbody.
Read the entire Innerbody.com survey here.
