All 23 Uses of
syphilis
in
The Tipping Point
- In pursuit of this radical idea, I'm going to take you to Baltimore, to learn from the epidemic of syphilis in that city.†
Chpt Intr. *syphilis = a sexually transmitted disease that, if treated early, can be completely cured with antibiotics
- ONE The Three Rules of Epidemics In the mid-1990s, the city of Baltimore was attacked by an epidemic of syphilis.†
Chpt 1
- If you look at Baltimore's syphilis rates on a graph, the line runs straight for years and then, when it hits 1995, rises almost at a right angle.†
Chpt 1
- What caused Baltimore's syphilis problem to tip?†
Chpt 1
- Crack is known to cause a dramatic increase in the kind of risky sexual behavior that leads to the spread of things like HIV and syphilis.†
Chpt 1
- Crack, the CDC said, was the little push that the syphilis problem needed to turn into a raging epidemic.†
Chpt 1
- The breakdown in treatment made syphilis a much bigger issue than it had been before.†
Chpt 1
- His culprits are the physical changes in those years affecting East and West Baltimore, the heavily depressed neighborhoods on either side of Baltimore's downtown, where the syphilis problem was centered.†
Chpt 1
- For years syphilis had been confined to a specific region of Baltimore, within highly confined sociosexual networks.†
Chpt 1
- The housing dislocation process served to move these people to other parts of Baltimore, and they took their syphilis and other behaviors with them.†
Chpt 1
- What they were saying is that there was a subtle increase in the severity of the crack problem in the mid-1990s, and that change was enough to set off the syphilis epidemic.†
Chpt 1
- All it took, he said, was the demolition of a handful of housing projects and the abandonment of homes in key downtown neighborhoods to send syphilis over the top.†
Chpt 1
- When the clinics were cut back, syphilis was given a second life.†
Chpt 1
- Potterat, for his part, was focused on the people who were carrying syphilis.†
Chpt 1
- Syphilis, he was saying, was a disease carried by a certain kind of person in Baltimore — a very poor, probably drug-using, sexually active individual.†
Chpt 1
- If that kind of person was suddenly transported from his or her old neighborhood to a new one — to a new part of town, where syphilis had never been a problem before — the disease would have an opportunity to tip.†
Chpt 1
- When we say that a handful of East Village kids started the Hush Puppies epidemic, or that the scattering of the residents of a few housing projects was sufficient to start Baltimore's syphilis epidemic, what we are really saying is that in a given process or system some people matter more than others.†
Chpt 1
- In Baltimore, when the city's public clinics suffered cutbacks, the nature of the syphilis affecting the city's poor neighborhoods changed.†
Chpt 1
- But with the cutbacks, syphilis increasingly became a chronic disease, and the disease's carriers had three or four or five times longer to pass on their infection.†
Chpt 1
- Every time someone in Baltimore comes to a public clinic for treatment of syphilis or gonorrhea, John Zenilman plugs his or her address into his computer, so that the case shows up as a little black star on a map of the city.†
Chpt 1
- The seasonal effect on the number of cases is so strong that it is not hard to imagine that a long, hard winter in Baltimore could be enough to slow or lessen substantially — at least for the season — the growth of the syphilis epidemic.†
Chpt 1
- In Baltimore, syphilis spreads far more in the summer than in the winter.†
Chpt 4
- You can prevent crimes just by scrubbing off graffiti and arresting fare-beaters: crime epidemics have Tipping Points every bit as simple and straightforward as syphilis in Baltimore or a fashion trend like Hush Puppies.†
Chpt 4