By India Gardener / Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan reporting for the Kent State-Ohio News Connection Collaboration.

In Ohio, the rate of congenital syphilis has increased more than 300%, from 22 cases in 2018 to 93 in 2022. Nationally, syphilis in newborns reached a 10-year high in 2022 with more than 3,700 cases. 

According to the Ohio Hospital Association, untreated congenital syphilis can have harmful consequences, potentially leading to miscarriage, low birth weight, premature birth, and other complications.

According to the CDC, syphilis is a sexually transmitted bacterial infection transmitted through direct contact with a syphilis sore. Pregnant individuals with syphilis can pass the infection to their unborn child.

“So that goes to show us that if it's left untreated, then we can have severe complications such as infection to the brain, nervous system, eyes, hearing loss, stroke, and blindness,” said Caroline Kingori, an associate professor of community and public health at Ohio University. “The other thing is it puts someone at a heightened risk of contracting HIV. So when syphilis is untreated during pregnancy, you're putting the mother and the child at risk.” 

Public health advocates say early detection and treatment of the disease is critically important to the health of mothers and babies. Syphilis can cause a wide variety of symptoms or no symptoms at all, at least for a while, so mothers may not know they’re infected — especially if they don’t have ongoing access to healthcare.

“Syphilis symptoms can be delayed,” said Fred Wyand, director of communications of the American Sexual Health Association. “They may not show up immediately, right at birth. It may take a little while. And that's also true when people acquire syphilis with these dull sexual contact symptoms that may not be immediate and then they tend to come and go. Somebody referred to syphilis as the great pretender because you can have symptoms like some skin rashes and ulcers that just clear up and go away, but it didn't. It's still there and can do some damage underneath.”

Public health advocates say the rise could be due to multiple factors, including a lack of testing and treatment. In Ohio in 2021, only 78.6% of babies were born to mothers who received early prenatal care. One in seven infants were born to mothers who received inadequate prenatal care.

Newborns of Black, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaskan Native mothers are eight times more likely to have congenital syphilis than those of white women, suggesting the disparity is linked to potential gaps in prenatal care and health insurance access within nonwhite communities.

“If you're dealing with communities that are underserved and rural, you're talking about people who don't have access to health insurance,” Kingori said. “Then the socioeconomic status includes education, employment, and if they don't have income, they're struggling. And if they don't have employment, then they also don't have health insurance. If they do, they're underinsured, and so health becomes secondary to people trying to find an opportunity to eat.”

While healthcare is crucial in preventing the transmission of syphilis to infants, experts say we also need to improve conversations and education about sexually transmitted infections (STIs). 

“About half of young people will have an STD by the time they reach age 25,” Wyand said. “To think about that one out of two people, by the time they reach age 25 in this country, will have an STI. A lot of these cases are undiagnosed. But young people in that age group from the teens up to the mid-20s, bear the highest burden of STI of any age group,” 

The World Health Organization emphasizes that children and adolescents have the right to age-appropriate and developmentally suitable comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) for their health and well-being. 

“Raising awareness is critical,” Kingori said. “It's raising awareness and normalizing the language we associate with sexually transmitted infections. The weight that we give cervical cancer and the concern we produce for that, we should do the same with STIs, with the same empathy. It will help combat that stigma and also find ways to use non-stigmatizing language so that pregnant mothers or pregnant individuals can have access to the prevention and treatment services outside of the judgment.”

According to the Federal Office of Disease and Health Prevention, parents have the greatest impact on a young person's decisions about relationships and sex, even more than friends or the media. Open communication between parents and children leads to delayed sexual activity and a higher likelihood of making healthy choices, such as using condoms to prevent pregnancy and STIs.

“We think a real barrier to all this stuff is that we are not comfortable talking about it and we don't know how to talk about it,” Wyand said, pointing to a resource on ASHA’s website called “Be an Askable Parent.” “And that's not our fault. We're not blaming anybody. You don't know this stuff, but that's a big part of what we do and as we try to help people have these conversations and we give them practical stuff, we just don't tell them you need to talk.”


This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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Sunday is Mother's Day, and what moms may need most is a day off.

Research shows that inequities persist in the amount of time moms and dads spend on child care. In 2023, American mothers spent on average 167% more time on primary caregiving than fathers. And the Institute for Women's Policy Research says that costs a mom nearly $17,000 per year - and $450 billion nationwide - in "foregone" income.

Kate Bahn, the institute's chief economist and senior vice president for research, said the trend continues with "secondary child care," or supervising children while multitasking - mothers spend 133% more time doing so than fathers.

"That is not time you can go into an office. That is not time where you can be out of the house," she said. "And so, that is time where you also still can't work for earnings. Some mothers are really constrained by their disproportionate caregiving responsibility."

Data show that in Montana, mothers make 59% of what fathers make per year - a difference of nearly $25,000. The inequities are worse among Native American moms in the state, whose pay is about half the earnings of white fathers.

Bahn added that rural families may face extra barriers.

"If we're thinking about all the constraints that shape how women decide to engage in the labor market," she said, "it can be things like driving distance to a job, access to child-care services for your children."

A bill to help support child-care workers in Montana passed both chambers of the state Legislature and could get to the governor's desk. It would expand eligibility for the "Best Beginnings Child Care Scholarship Program" to include child care workers - who are some of the state's lowest-paid workers.


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Wildland firefighting is a tough job and the industry has long struggled with worker retention. Training boot camps have helped bring new firefighters, especially women, into the fold in recent years, but federal cuts could threaten progress.

About 84% of federal wildland firefighters are men, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Boot camps targeting women have been popular. Montana saw its first just last year.

Riva Duncan, vice president of the group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, worked in fire for more than three decades and said the boot camps offered a "safe environment" to raise concerns.

"Beyond the actual required training, just having discussions about, 'Well, how do you address hygiene? What do I do if I feel like I'm being treated unfairly?' And those kinds of questions that don't get covered in a classroom setting," Duncan explained.

Since the boot camps are designed to increase workforce diversity, future programs have been cut under the Trump administration's DEI rollbacks. Following the firing and then rehiring of 6,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture employees since February, including some with firefighting duties, the Interior Department announced permanent pay raises for wildland firefighters in the new federal appropriations budget.

The U.S. Forest Service has seen a 45% attrition rate of wildland firefights over the last three years. Duncan argued the DEI cuts will not help.

"We need people who want to do this work. We need the kind of people that value working on the public lands and serving the American taxpayers," Duncan emphasized. "This has detrimental effects to the overall recruitment and retention strategy to try and get firefighters into these jobs."

Fourteen different scheduled women's boot camps have been canceled. According to the USDA, about 65,000 wildfires burned nearly 9 million acres across the U.S. in 2024.


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March is Women's History Month and an Arkansas native has made history by being honored with a $1 coin from the U.S. Mint.

The late Raye Montague was an engineer with the U.S. Navy and created the first computer-generated rough draft of a U.S. naval ship in 1971. Because of her work, ships could be designed in 18 hours instead of two years.

David Montague, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Raye's son, said his family worked closely with the mint to create the coin's design.

"It was her with her hand over her heart, which is patriotic, and then looking over the ship that she designed, the Oliver Hazard Perry," Montague explained. "That struck me immediately. And then the background, underneath the ship is the sea, and then that is actually a computer grid."

He recalled when he was a child, he collected coins with his mother, so it is fitting she would receive the honor. She died in 2018.

Last year, the federal building where she worked, in Bethesda, Maryland, was renamed the Raye Montague Center for Maritime Technology. Her son pointed out although his mother faced obstacles, she created time to help others.

"She saw it as the natural course of her professional opportunities," Montague observed. "If she was able to gain opportunities to do things and grow as a human being, she wanted to make sure that she opened doors for other people and was trying to make the world a better place."

The coin was released earlier this year and Montague noted it is already being used to continue his mother's legacy. The currency was shared with kids in an Arkansas youth group.

"They used the coin to say you all are Arkansas youth and this person was an Arkansas youth, and look, they're on a dollar coin," Montague added. "If she can do great things, as long as you work hard and you push for opportunities, then you have options as well."


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