There appears to be quite a number of people living with sexually transmitted infections in the Royal City and surrounding areas.
In particular, there were 766 reported cases of chlamydia in 2023 compared to 670 in 2022. There were also 14 cases of non-infectious syphilis in 2023 compared with 11 in 2022.The report also suggests certain STIs have gone down in recent years but the number of cases remain quite high. There were 117 cases of gonorrhea in 2023 compared to 122 the year before, and 18 infectious syphilis cases in 2023 down from 32 in 2022.“What we are seeing is a fraction of the overall picture,” said Dr.
“We know that during the most intense periods of the COVID-19 pandemic, when we had social distancing, restrictions on gatherings, and very different norms around person-to-person interactions, we saw a lot these diseases go down in terms of their rates.”