Gonorrhea, once an easily treated and relatively mild STI, is becoming a superbug
Gonorrhea, once an easily treated and relatively mild STI, is becoming a superbug with major public health implications...
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In February, public health officials in the UK reported that three people there had recently contracted gonorrhea, the well-known sexually transmitted infection. What made the cases noteworthy is that they were caused by a highly resistant strain of the bacteria. This “super gonorrhea” threatens to be one of the first omnipresent dangers of a post-antibiotic era that’s already well on its way here.
Gonorrhea, caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae, is just the latest of previously tamed illnesses that have evolved to become more dangerous. Drug-resistant infections, commonly known as superbugs, directly killed 1.27 million people worldwide in 2019—a sum higher than deaths individually caused by tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria, the big three infectious killers that year—and they may have contributed to 5 million deaths in total, according to a recent report published in the Lancet. A 2018 study estimated that superbugs killed up to 160,000 Americans in 2010.
In recent years, our arms race with gonorrhea had gotten to the point where there were only two widely recommended antibiotics for its standard treatment: azithromycin, taken as a pill, and ceftriaxone, given as a shot. By the mid-2010s, though, some regions were already seeing a large percentage of strains with some resistance to azithromycin, which led to a recommendation in many countries, including the U.S., to adopt a combination strategy of using both drugs at once. Then, in 2018, something that many experts had feared came to pass: A man in the UK was found to be infected with a strain highly resistant to the combo. Soon after, two similar cases were reported in Australia.
https://gizmodo.com/the-rise-of-supe...hea-1848808707
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Originally Posted by Tahuyaman
