An excavation of a seventeenth-century cemetery at St Thomas's Hospital in London, England found that 13 per cent of skeletons showed evidence of treponemal lesions. These lesions are only present in a small minority of<unk> ic cases, implying that the hospital was treating large numbers of<unk> ics. In 1770s London, approximately 1 in 5 people over the age of 35 were infected with<unk> . In 1770s Chester, the figure was about 8.06 per cent. By 1911, the figure for London was 11.4 per cent, about half that of the 1770s. A 2014 study estimated the prevalance of<unk>  in the United Kingdom in 1911-1912 as 7.771%. The location with the highest prevalence was London, at 11.373%, and the social class with the highest prevalence was unskilled working-class, at 11.781%. The control of<unk>  in the United Kingdom began with the 1916 report of a Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases. Clinics were established offering testing and education. This caused a fall in the prevalence of<unk> , leading to almost a halving of tabes dorsalis between 1914 and 1936. With the mass production of penicillin from 1943,<unk>  could be cured.<unk>  screening was introduced for every pregnancy. Contact tracing was also introduced. By 1956, congenital<unk>  had been almost eliminated, and female cases of acquired<unk>  had been reduced to a hundredth of their level just 10 years previously. In 1978 in England and Wales, homosexual men accounted for 58% of<unk>  cases in (and 76% of cases in London), but by 1994–6 this figure was 25%, possibly driven by safe-sex practices to avoid HIV. In 1995, only 130 total cases were reported. A substantial proportion of infections are linked to foreign travel. Antenatal testing continues. In the United States in 1917, 6% of World War I servicemen were found to have<unk> . In 1936 a public health campaign began to prescribe arsphenamine to treat<unk> . Between 1945 and 1955 penicillin was used to treat over two million Americans for<unk> , and contact tracing was introduced.<unk>  prevalance dropped to an all time low by 1955. A total of 6993 cases of primary and secondary<unk>  were recorded in 1998, the lowest number since 1941. In 2000 and 2001 in the United States, the national rate of reported primary and secondary<unk>  cases was 2.1 cases per 100,000 population (6103 cases reported). This was the lowest rate since 1941. As of 2014, the incidence increased to 6.3 cases per 100,000 population (19,999 cases reported). The majority of these new cases were in men who have sex with men.<unk>  in newborns in the United States increased from 8.4 cases per 100,000 live births (334 cases) between 2008 and 2012 to 11.6 cases per 100,000 live births (448 cases) between 2012 and 2014.
History of syphilis
History of smallpox
History of leprosy
History of HIV/AIDS
History of chemical warfare
History of plague
History of malaria
History of penicillin