Gonorrhea bacteria: The next superbug?

After chlamydia, gonorrhea – also known as the “clap” — is the second most common bacterial STD (sexually transmitted disease). It’s easily transmitted. Women have a 60-80 % chance of becoming infected after a single sexual encounter with an infected male partner. Left untreated, the disease not only causes unpleasant symptoms – painful urination, urethral and vaginal discharge, projectile urination – but can lead to sterility.

Superbugs are bacteria that have become resistant to multiple antibiotics. The organism that causes gonorrhea (Neisseria gonorrhoeae) is very versatile and quick to develop resistance.

A few decades ago, gonorrhea became resistant to penicillin. Tetracycline is no longer effective. The disease is rapidly becoming resistant to the fluoroquinolone family of broad-spectrum antibiotics (ciprofloxacin, ofloxacin, levofloxacin). Currently, doctors use cefixime or ceftriaxone to treat gonorrhea, but there are now signs of resistance to these drugs as well, particularly to cefixime.

With no new antibiotics, we’re left with public health measures

Professor Catherine Ison, a gonorrhea specialist at Britain’s Health Protection Agency, reports: “There are few new drugs available. … If this problem isn’t addressed then there is a real possibility that gonorrhea will become a very difficult infection to treat.”

Precisely. With little motivation for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics, the control of gonorrhea is left to public health measures: encouraging the use of condoms, routine physical exams, screenings for STDs, and improving communication between nations on treatment methods.
Since gonorrhea no longer responds well to a single antibiotic, the currently recommended treatment uses two different antibiotics. On the one hand, this treatment strategy can extend the time it takes the bacteria to develop antibiotic resistance.

When you factor in human behavior, however, it makes the situation worse. When patients need to return to a doctor for additional treatments, they are less likely to complete the full course of their medication. This greatly increases the likelihood that the gonorrhea bacterium will become a superbug.

The World Health Organization (WHO) will meet in Manila next week to discuss the situation. There are things that can be done to delay the superbug status of this disease, but what we really need is the development of new antibiotics.

Source: National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine comments on this World War II poster:

This poster warned that even the perfect girl-next-door could not be trusted. In contrast to the cigarette-smoking, heavily made-up women in posters warning against exposure to prostitutes, this poster features an apparently average and conservatively dressed woman who might also pose a threat. Featured in the poster is the warning to all servicemen that “She May Look Clean–But pick-ups, good-time girls and prostitutes” could be possible carriers of infection. The underlying caption uses the persistent tactic of appealing to the soldier’s sense of patriotism in urging them to protect themselves for the sake of the country: suggesting that, “You can’t beat the Axis if you get VD.”

Related posts:
Links of interest: Antibiotic resistance
Overuse of antibiotics: Follow the money (part 1)
Overuse of antibiotics: A remote study (part 2)
Antibiotic resistance genes in soil microbes
Global challenge: 10 new antibiotics by 2010
Why are there no new antibiotics?
A brief history of antibiotics