The CDC's 2026 STI Awareness Week ran April 12 through 18, 2026, with agency messaging and state health-department companion events landing between April 6 and April 16. Central to the observance was a newly emphasized data point: syphilis rates among women in the United States rose 145% from 2020 to 2024, against a 58% rise among men over the same period. The CDC anchored the week around two public-facing campaigns — "Talk. Test. Treat." and "Prepare Before You're There" — encouraging routine testing, partner communication, and pre-encounter planning.

Why It Matters

The 145% rise in women's syphilis cases reframes the state-level age-verification and reproductive-health debates as downstream of a measurable, rising public-health crisis. For sextech companies in the at-home STI-testing space (Everlywell, myLAB Box, Nurx, LetsGetChecked), the CDC's public framing is a demand signal at exactly the moment federal clinic funding is being restructured. For telehealth platforms (Hims, Ro, Nurx), the data supports the case for expanded STI screening bundled with ED, dermatology, and contraception products. For investors, the divergence between rising STI infection rates and contracting federal funding points to a decade-long private-market opening in sexual health diagnostics and preventive care.

The disparity in the rise is the story. Syphilis had been falling for decades before reversing in the mid-2010s, and the gender divergence over the past four years reflects a quieter, broader breakdown in routine sexual-health screening — particularly for women in rural and non-metropolitan settings. New York, Virginia, and several other state health departments held companion events during the week, with NYDOH releasing data on congenital syphilis cases tied to the rise in adult women's infections. The CDC's messaging pairs the syphilis data with reminders on gonorrhea, chlamydia, HIV, and HPV, and flags at-home testing kits (Everlywell, myLAB Box, Nurx) as part of the routine-testing infrastructure.

The observance lands at a politically fraught moment. The Trump HHS released delayed Title X fiscal-2026 grants on April 1, then issued a fiscal-2027 funding notice on April 8-14 that gives preference to organizations emphasizing fertility-awareness and "natural family planning" over hormonal contraception — a pivot that many of the same Title X clinics providing free STI testing described as an existential threat to their service model. The CDC's syphilis data is, in effect, being published into a federal policy environment that is reallocating the funding that would address it.

Sources

Update — 2026-04-20

Initial entry — story first created.