CASE REPORT Congenital syphilis in Italy

The cases are described of two infants who developed clinical and laboratory signs of congenital syphilis in Northern Italy, a region where the disease had not been documented for several years. The report urges greater vigilance and screening for syphilis among pregnant women and newborns, and con-tributes to the evidence that the incidence of syphilis is rising among women in Italy. T he re-emergence of infectious syphilis in Western Europe and the USA after a period of decline has been described.1 2 In Italy, cases of early syphilis (primary, secondary and early latent) increased significantly after 2001.3 In all these settings, the epidemic of infectious syphilis has largely been confined to homosexual men, although in the UK there is evidence that diagnoses of syphilis rose by 255 % in wome