Via The Washington Post: ‘Our greatest fear’: Highly drug-resistant gonorrhea confirmed by health officials. Excerpt and then a comment:
A super-resistant strain of gonorrhea has been reported in the United Kingdom following warnings from global public health officials that the common sexually transmitted disease is becoming more difficult to treat.
Health officials in England said it is the first time that a case of gonorrhea could not be treated successfully with antibiotics that are commonly used to cure it.
Earlier this year, a man, who was not named, sought treatment there for symptoms that he developed about a month after he had sexual contact with a woman in Southeast Asia, according to a case report from Public Health England. The bacterial infection was treated with two antibiotics, azithromycin and ceftriaxone, but subsequent tests still came back positive for the disease, the officials said.
“This is the first time a case has displayed such high-level resistance to both of these drugs and to most other commonly used antibiotics,” Gwenda Hughes, who leads the sexually transmitted infection section at Public Health England, said Wednesday in a statement.
Gonorrhea, which is caused by the bacterium, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases around the world.
Each year, there are an estimated 78 million cases across the globe — about 820,000 of which are reported in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
But public health officials said it is becoming more and more resistant to drugs.
Teodora Wi, medical officer of human reproduction at WHO, said in a news release last year that the bacteria that cause gonorrhea are highly intelligent, explaining that “every time we use a new class of antibiotics to treat the infection, the bacteria evolve to resist them.”
It's not certain how the patient in England contracted the super-resistant strain. Although he had contact with a woman in Asia, he also had one female partner in the United Kingdom, according to the recent report from Public Health England. She avoided infection.
Following treatment, a throat swab revealed that the man's infection was still present.
The patient was then treated intravenously with another antibiotic called ertapenem, and preliminary tests show that the medication may be working.
He will be tested again next month.
As Maryn McKenna pointed out in a recent tweet, all the attention has been paid to this man—not to the woman he had sex with in Asia, or to her other possible contacts. But I hope that Public Health England, ECDC, and WHO are working hard to trace that woman and her contacts.
