SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Finding quick sex may be easier than ever because of the Internet, but it is also leading to growth in some sexual diseases, especially among gay men, a San Francisco health official said on Wednesday.

Jeffrey Klausner, director of sexual disease prevention at the city's Department of Public Health, said 38 percent of recent syphilis cases are among people who met online, up from 20 to 25 percent two years ago.

He said getting diseases such as syphilis was more likely when meeting people online than in every day affairs because of the crowd online sex chat rooms attract.

"It is just a lot easier for people to meet partners online, so they are more likely to meet more partners," he said in an interview.

"It brings together what we call high-risk core groups who are particularly interested in having a lot of new partners and ... it is these high-risk core groups that are the first groups to get new infections."

He said researchers had linked the first Internet-related outbreak of syphilis to 1999 around a gay chatroom on AOL called M4M. Syphilis is easily curable with antibiotics but, left untreated, can cause permanent brain and heart damage.

U.S. cities known for their large gay populations such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Miami have seen sharp increases in syphilis cases recently but have not reached the height seen in 1982 before AIDS tempered promiscuous behavior.



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