971 - An Update on Syphilis in the Great Plains Region
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 3 November 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About this episode:
Last spring, Dr. Meghan Curry O'Connell joined Public Health On Call from ground zero of a syphilis outbreak among American Indian and Alaskan Native people in the Great Plains Region. In this episode: She provides an update on the situation, explaining how a collaborative team has been able to overcome obstacles and make progress.
Guests:
Dr. Meghan Curry O'Connell, MPH, is the chief public health officer at the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board and a member of the Cherokee Nation.
Host:
Lindsay Smith Rogers, MA, is the producer of the Public Health On Call podcast, an editor for Expert Insights, and the director of content strategy for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Show links and related content:
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Efforts to curb SD's syphilis outbreak yield results, but public health advocate says work remains—South Dakota Searchlight
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How a fight over data made South Dakota's bad syphilis outbreak worse—Vox
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A Public Health Emergency: Syphilis Surges in the Great Plains Region—Public Health On Call (May 2024)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:31.3 | Hey listeners, it's Lindsay Smith-Rogers, and today we're bringing you an update on the public health response to devastating outbreaks of syphilis among tribal residents in the Great Plains region of the U.S. |
| 0:42.4 | Dr. Megan Curry O'Connell, Chief Public Health Officer of the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board and a member of the Teraki Nation, |
| 0:49.9 | returns to the podcast to talk with me about the significant efforts to curb what was a 2,000% increase in transmission and what's happening now, particularly with deadly cases of congenital syphilis among infants. |
| 1:03.2 | Let's listen. |
| 1:04.4 | Dr. Megan Curry O'Connell, welcome back to public health on call. How are you doing? |
| 1:08.8 | Great. Thanks so much for having me back. It's good to see you. |
| 1:11.5 | It's been a minute. So it's actually been 18 months to be specific. We've had you on before to talk |
| 1:16.5 | about this rise of syphilis cases that was occurring. So can you take us back to May 2020 and just |
| 1:21.8 | kind of give us the lay of the land of what was happening then? Sure. So back then, we had been addressing a large syphilis outbreak in the Great |
| 1:31.4 | Plains area, which is North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Nebraska, Iowa that was concentrated |
| 1:36.3 | among American Indian and Alaska Native people. There's been a rise in syphilis cases nationally |
| 1:41.5 | over the last several years, really for a while, but the cases |
| 1:45.5 | really shot up around 2020 during the pandemic. And we'd been working to bring those cases down, |
| 1:52.2 | but we're facing a lot of challenges related to having enough staff, having enough treatment, |
| 1:58.6 | having the data that we needed to be able to go find people with syphilis |
| 2:03.3 | and treat them. And so it was a challenging time, to be honest. There was a lot going on. And we were |
| 2:10.1 | doing everything we could to try to address the syphilis outbreak. And just to position your role in this |
| 2:16.2 | as the chief public health officer, can you talk a little bit about the work that you were doing then? |
... |
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