Sometimes, as a result of unprotected sexual intercourse with an unfamiliar partner, a woman faces the problem of such an unpleasant and dangerous infectious disease as syphilis .
Syphilis is caused by a pale spirochete, which looks like a curved spiral under the microscope.
Syphilis for women is especially dangerous, as it is often found during the period of gestation, and this can not pass without a trace for either the woman or her future child.
What are the symptoms of syphilis?
The first symptoms of syphilis in women are manifested in the external genitalia, the vaginal mucosa, the cervix . They look like ulcers with a brownish-red bottom, even edges and a dense base, which is also called hard chancre.
As a rule, after 2-7 days chancre disappears. But this does not mean that the disease has stopped. Conversely, the pale spirochete through the blood and lymph vessels spreads throughout the body and begins to destroy it.
At the secondary stage, the symptoms of syphilis in girls and women are manifested by rashes on the mucous membranes and skin. They are especially noticeable on the genitals. Lymph nodes increase. Possible the appearance of papules in the tongue, in the oral cavity, in the vocal cords; wide condylomas in the anal region and genital area. Eyebrows and eyelashes may begin to fall out, which is especially unpleasant for women.
In the absence of treatment, these symptoms of syphilis after two and a half months pass, and the disease goes into a latent form.
Can syphilis be asymptomatic?
Syphilis can also be asymptomatic.
For example, at the initial stage (4 to 5 weeks from the time the pathogen enters the body), the infection may not manifest itself at all, and a person, not knowing about his illness, can infect other people.
Syphilis can have an asymptomatic course from the time of infection to the later stages. In these cases, talk about latent syphilis (early and late). In this case, blood tests for infection are positive. Such patients are identified in the course of examinations of sexual partners of a person suffering from syphilis, or during preventive medical examinations (mass, when receiving medical certificates, during pregnancy).
Usually such people do not remember from whom and when they could get an infection, and did not notice any manifestations characteristic of syphilis.