Neurosyphilis in HIV-Infected Persons

At the beginning of this century, while he was developing schedules for the treatment of syphilis with arsphenamine, Ehrlich discovered that inadequate therapy for early syphilis was followed within 6 to 12 months by the appearance of neurologic disease that he called neurorecurrence.1 This early neurosyphilis was unlike typical tertiary neurosyphilis, which develops after a much longer period of latency, in that it involved mesodermal rather than ectodermal tissues and, consequently, was characterized by acute meningitis, cranial-nerve abnormalities, or stroke rather than by dementia, psychosis, or tabes dorsalis. In the 1930s Merritt and his coworkers1 observed only 80 patients with . . .