Men are using condoms less, even as syphilis and other STDs surge

The basket of free ultrathin and studded condoms stayed full to the brim — a recurrent reality that no longer surprised the D.C. health workers offering HIV testing this month at a downtown plaza.

Public health authorities are confronting a rise in sexually transmitted infections in a world where condom use has steadily declined — and, with it, one of the most effective ways of curbing the spread of disease.

“They’ll laugh at it, or sometimes they get it and throw it away,” said Kevins Anglade, a community outreach worker for Whitman-Walker Health, a D.C.-based LGBT health-care organization that opened in the 1970s as the Gay Men’s Venereal Disease Clinic. “It’s a new normal, which is very sad.”

The United States recorded nearly 2.5 million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis in 2021, more than doubling in the past two decades, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease