Drug-resistant gonorrhea worrisome

Washington Post

U.S. health officials have identified a cluster of gonorrhea infections that show sharply increased resistance to the last effective treatment available for the country’s second most commonly reported infectious disease.

The findings from a cluster of Hawaii cases, presented this week at a conference on prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, represent the first cases in the United States that have shown such decreased susceptibility to the double-antibiotic combination used when other drugs have failed. If the bacteria continue to develop resistance, that end-of-the-line therapy ultimately will fail, and an estimated 800,000 Americans a year could face untreatable gonorrhea and the serious health problems it causes, officials said.

This latest news about antibiotic resistance came on the same day as world leaders gathered at an unusual meeting at the United Nations to address the rising threat posed by superbugs, microbes that can’t be stopped with drugs.

Countries called for better use of existing tools to prevent infections in humans and animals, including farmed fish. Norway’s prime minister spoke about how her country has been vaccinating every single “baby salmon, just like small kids,” and as a result, has cut antibiotic use in one of its principal foods and exports to virtually zero.

Common and lifethreatening infections like pneumonia, gonorrhea and tuberculosis are increasingly becoming untreatable because of antibiotic resistance, they said.

In the United States, drug-resistant gonorrhea already is one of the country’s three most urgent superbug threats, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In each case, as with other diseases, overexposure to antibiotics has allowed the particular germ to more rapidly develop resistance.

CDC warned this summer that evidence of gonorrhea’s resistance to one of the last-resort drugs, azithromycin, was emerging nationwide.

That’s why the latest findings are so distressing for health officials. It means current treatment options are in jeopardy, said Gail Bolan, director of CDC’s division of STD prevention.

Many people don’t actually know they’re infected with gonorrhea because they have no symptoms. As a result, the disease goes undetected and untreated.

At the conference, researchers from Louisiana State University presented data about a drug under development that they said was generally safe and effective in treating gonorrhea in a phase 2 clinical trial.

Those results will need to be confirmed in a largescale clinical trial.