Director of Public Health Peter Kelly told the Telegraph research points to sites like Facebook "making it easier for people to meet up for casual sex," and that of the syphilis cases he saw, "several of the people had met sexual partners through these sites."
The connection between the STD and Facebook seems stretched at best, but the Telegraph also reports, "young people in Sunderland, Durham and Teesside were 25 per cent more likely to log onto social networking sites than those in the rest of Britain."
Still we're not entirely convinced that Facebook is the primary factor contributing to the rise of syphilis in these areas; perhaps the educational institutions in these regions need to ramp up their safe sex initiatives. Although, with 400 million members now spanning the world, it does make sense that more hookups would happen with Facebook as the facilitator and go-between.