There was an episode of the PBS TV series, "Frontline," entitled "The Lost Children of Rockland County, which was an account of a supposed syphilis epidemic among teenagers in an affluent, new suburb of Atlanta. I found an interesting commentary on this show, and I'll quote part of it below:
QUOTE: In 1999 the network broadcast an episode of Frontline that became legendary. Called "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," it centered on a teen syphilis outbreak in Conyers, Georgia, an exurb of Atlanta where vast acres of farmland have been converted into subdivisions of large, handsome houses, and where the three local high schools, flush with tax dollars, are among the best in the state. The show became a sensation, was repeatedly rebroadcast, and was featured on Oprah, where it was called a "must see for all parents."
"The Lost Children of Rockdale County" is a bizarre program that takes isolated teen depravity, anxious adult voyeurism, and an ever important dash of venereal disease and blends them into a vividly yellow piece of public-service journalism—one that typically exaggerates the what, and in so doing just as typically overlooks the why behind a less sensational but far more pervasive concern. The tale is told largely by middle-aged women who are at turns clinically matter-of-fact about and pruriently fascinated by what happened in Conyers. A small group of white girls from stupendously troubled families (the kids are described as "cherubic" for maximum effect) began meeting in one of the girls' houses after school—and sometimes in a motel room—to do drugs and service two groups of rough trade, one of local white boys, the other of African-American boys (a recent prison inmate among them) who commuted from a different part of the county to avail themselves of the girls. Oral sex wasn't the half of it—what these kids allegedly engaged in combined the degeneracy of a satanic cult with the agility of a Cirque du Soleil troupe. We are told that a common after-school activity in Conyers was "the sandwich," in which a girl would be simultaneously penetrated by as many as four boys (the fourth, apparently a Johnny-come-lately, would somehow shoehorn himself into an orifice already occupied by one of his pals). With the kids in Conyers exploiting virtually every known opening for sexual transmission, an outbreak was not unlikely. It spread to seventeen kids, who were treated and who recovered fully.
Four months after the Frontline documentary aired, Talk magazine published an essay called "The Sex Lives of Your Children." Its author, Lucinda Franks, described an upper-middle-class white world in which oral sex began at age twelve, and said—in perhaps the first published use of the term—that train parties abounded. For the sake of journalistic accuracy she reported a twelve-year-old girl's description of the taste of sperm, and during an NPR radio interview about her essay she referred to the Conyers incident in the wildly inaccurate way in which the episode had quickly passed into the national consciousness: in Rockdale County, Georgia, "a whole town—the kids came down with syphilis..."
In 2003 Oprah addressed the topic again: in an article in O magazine that she also featured on her television show. "Parents, brace yourselves," Oprah said. Teenagers are leading "double lives"—and we all need to get hip to the code words they use. The journalist who wrote the article got right to the point: A "tossed salad," for example, was "oral sex to the anus." A "dirty" girl was a diseased one. And a "rainbow party" was a blowjob party where the girls wore different-colored lipstick. UNQUOTE.
http://humanitiespolicy.unt.edu/blogs/index.php?blog=5&m=2006
My guess is that whatever "syphilis" was in this particular case, if it's even possible to talk of one "disease" entity amongst these teenagers, it involved an inflammatory response to exposure to a great deal of "foreign" substances, which can produce rashes on the skin, obviously. If a "germ" was the cause, then these kinds of instances should be much, much more common, and there should have been many of these "outbreaks" since then (more than 12 years ago now). Rather, these particular children stressed their bodies "beyond the breaking point" and symptoms developed. If they continued such behavior, I would not be surprised if "AIDS"-like conditions occurred, along with symptoms deemed to be those of "advanced syphilis," but "germs" are not the issue in these kinds of conditions. "Germs" can change if biochemical conditions are very stressful, and this can provoke an inflammatory response, but the underlying cause is the stress, not the "germs," which are ubiquitous in these kinds of "infectious diseases."
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