No...Really. Keep It In Your Pants. Please.

Really, it's a typical story: guy and girl go to bar with their various friends, looking to mingle. Guy and girl meet. Guy and girl have drinks. Girl invites guy home to her place to check out her bootleg Top Chef DV--wait, is that part just us?

Anyway. When the guy and girl wake up the next morning, it lately seems as if they should get checked for syphilis. The Chronicle reports that Houston's trying to control a marked increase in the number of cases recorded in our fair city. See, syphilis stats, after decades of decline, are on the upswing again nationally, as they've been for the past six years. In Houston, though, a nearly 50 percent jump in new cases in 2006 has caused concern, and thus-far in '07 cases are--ahem--popping up at an even more alarming rate. In face, Houston's on track to more than double last year's number of cases.

An advertising campaign centered in neighborhoods with high incidence of the disease is scheduled to begin this weekend, but "there's not too many ZIP codes ... where we're not seeing any [cases]" said Marlene McNeese-Ward, the city health department's chief of HIV/STD and Viral Hepatitis Prevention. She also plans to send out the mobile unit of her department to affected neighborhoods: in it is a testing center where confidential tests for various STIs can be performed. They'll start in Montrose, since Houston's cases are statistically mostly among men who are sexually active within their gender.

So after you watch those Top Chef DVDs? Be safe. Please. (And yes, the picture is actual syphilis microbes. Ew.)