Docs failing to screen for chlamydia

SAN DIEGO, May 8 (UPI) -- Roughly half the women who should be tested for chlamydia, the most common sexually transmitted disease, actually get tested, say U.S. doctors.

"We are not doing a great job in screening these women," Daniel Soper, professor of internal medicine and of obstetrics and gynecology at the Medical University of South Carolina, said Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in San Diego.

Doctors screened just over 50 percent of patients who were insured by Medicare and about 35 percent of patients who had private insurance. The disease often has no symptoms but can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility.

Soper said that treatment for chlamydia -- which is carried by about 3 million women in the United States -- is a single dose of azithromycin. Even after more than 15 years of use, chlamydia has not become resistant to the drug, he noted.

Soper said some doctors try to get the woman's partner treated as well by sending the patient home with a pill that would cure the cause of infection.

However, he said that laws in a majority of states make it illegal to prescribe drugs to someone who is not a patient. Even though azithromycin will cure the patient of chlamydia infection, it can't stop re-infection if the source of the disease remains infected, Soper said.