日本性感染症学会誌 Journal of Japanese Society for Sexually Transmitted Infections

Surveillance of patients with sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the Kitakyushu area has been conducted since 1997. Here, we report trends in STIs over a 21-year-period until 2017. The facilities which agreed to participate in this surveillance in the Kitakyushu area sent us annual reports of the gender and age of patients with STIs such as gonorrhea, genital chlamydia, condyloma acuminatum, genital herpes, trichomoniasis, syphilis, and phthiriasis pubis. The total number of patients per year peaked at 2,701 in 2002, and decreased since 2003, and has gone sideways from 2010 to 2017. In males, the most frequent infection until 2007 was gonococcal infection, changing to non-chlamydial non-gonococcal infection from 2008 to 2017. In females, the most common infection observed was chlamydia. The co-infection rates of gonorrhea and genital chlamydia were 28.7% for males and 42.1% for females during the period of 2010–2017. Recently, the number of syphilis cases has been increasing dramatically in Japan. However, this increase was not observed in our study. We will be continuing this survey in the future with some modifications to investigate trends of STIs in the Kitakyushu area.