Syphilis:
It is caused by little corkscrew-like organisms called spirochetes, which circulate in the blood-stream and burrow deep into the tissues of the body where they may be dormant and inactive for years. This disease kills hundreds, perhaps thousands of men and women each year, and also causes blindr-ess, “heart disease, insanity, skin diseases and many other ailments.
Always it is contracted from close sexual contact or intercourse with a person who has it. Fortunately, the disease can be treated quite easily with large doses of penicillin or other antibiotics as soon as it is discovered. This is not to say that syphilis is no longer a grave problem. It is! For one thing, a person cannot easily recognize syphilis in its early stages because its first symptoms are usually slight or similar to those of several other diseases. The most common symptom is a hard, painless, moist sore called Chancre. It usually appears from 10 days to 3 months after exposure, at the place where the spirochetes entered the body—in the man usually on the penis and in the woman deep within the Vagina where it cannot be seen. After a short time, from a few days to a month, the chancre disappears without treatment but this does not mean that the syphilis has disappeared. It has merely gone “underground”. Later, it may cause other symptoms: a non-itching rash most often on the palms or soles, or hair falling out in patches, plus a sore throat, low fever and body aching. But these symptoms also disappear and then the spirochetes spread undetected throughout the body, where, over
the years they may damage .the organs and cause serious diseases and not infrequently, death!
Many people ie of syphilis without ever knowing the real cause of their sickness. Heredity, twins, sex of unborn babies’. What is passed on to you from your mother and your father is called your heredity. In a family, one child may look a lot like the mother, another child may look more like the father. The resemblance may go farther back, and a child may look or even act like a grand-parent, an aunt or an uncle. Very, very small parts of the egg-cells and the sperm cell decide the heredity of the new baby. These are called the baby’s genes. The baby will get half his genes from his mother and half from the father. Each child in a family inherits different genes from its mother and different genes from its father. Which genes it receives depends on chance. This in one reason
that brothers and sisters are different in many ways. The only time thfs is not true is in the case of some twins. Twins can be started in two ways. Some twins are started
from one fertilized egg. The egg divides into two separate parts. Then each of these parts develops into a baby, and twins are born. These twins are almost exactly the same because they come from the same egg and the same sperm. Both inherit the same genes from their parents. They are called identical twins, and these identical twins are always of the same sex. Other twins are started when there are two eggs in the woman’s tubes
at about the same time. Each egg is fertilzed by a separate sperm. The two fertilized eggs then grow at the same time in the mother’s uterus and two babies are born at about the same time. But they are no more alike than ordinary brothers and sisters. They receive different sets of genes from their parents. They may be of the same sex or they may be boy and girl. They are called fraternal twins.
In a similar manner, triplets, quadruplets or quintuplets are born when three, four or five babies grow in the uterus at the same time. These brothers and sisters may be identical or fraternal; or there may be some of each. Birth of twins are unusual and birth of triplets, quadruplets, quintuplets etc. are still more unusual.
