Syphilis

Classic STI with a painless sore, curable with penicillin. Spirochete causing a painless chancre, then the systemic 'great imitator' stages.

Key facts

Did you know?

Treponema pallidum still can't be grown on artificial lab media — its genome is so degenerate, stripped of most metabolic genes, that it's obligately dependent on the host. That's why diagnosis relies on serology and dark-field microscopy rather than culture. The Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction, where patients feel dramatically worse hours after their first penicillin dose, comes from the mass lysis of spirochetes dumping lipoproteins into the bloodstream.

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