Source: Angola Press
The life of thousands of babies can be saved annually if pregnant women do the syphilis test, since early treatment can prevent contamination of the foetus.
This was said on Tuesday, in Luanda, by the gynaecologist Pedro de Almeida.
The physician, who works for the Lucrécia Paim public maternity hospital, said so at a seminar on Reproductive Health, adding that doing exams and treatment with antibiotics are a cheap and effective way of decreasing, to at least half, the number of deaths by such contamination.
According to the specialist, syphilis causes children to be born with a congenital defect on the bones, thus causing the death of half a million babies in the whole world.
He defined syphilis as an infectious disease caused by a bacterium whose technical name is "treponema pallidum".
He said the disease is sexually transmitted, but it can also be transmitted from a mother to her foetus, thus called congenital syphilis.