Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: Commom STD Gets Stronger
A new study, published online January 8 in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the common STD has become resistant to treatment in the U.S. Chlamydia and gonorrhea, which usually are treated easily with a dose of oral antibiotics, are now harder to treat.
“…the bacterium (Neisseria gonorrhoeae) has been steadily evolving to knock out medical weapons. Sulfonamides ceased to be effective in treating it in the 1940s; penicillins and tetracyclines lost effectiveness in the 1970s and ’80s; and fluoroquinolones were taken off the treatment table in 2007.
The last simple treatment, a class of antibiotics called cephalosporins, appears to be weakening against gonorrhea infections worldwide.
For the new study, researchers led by Vanessa Allen, of Public Health Ontario, examined people who were treated for gonorrhea with cefixime at a clinic in Toronto. The clinic required people to come in for a follow-up appointment two to four weeks later to make sure their infection had been cleared; it also surveyed patients about whether they might have been exposed to the infection since their initial visit. These practices allowed the researchers to gather data on how often the drug failed to work.
Of 133 patients who received treatment and returned for their follow-up appointment for testing, 6.77 percent had failed to respond to treatment, which corresponds to about one in 15 infections. Drug-resistant gonorrhea has officially arrived in North America.”
In light of growing drug-resistance worldwide, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently recommended clinicians no longer prescribe a single antibiotic treatment.