Gonorrhea is a relatively common disease, infecting 78 million people each year. Anyone who is sexually active can get gonorrhea, and the disease can spread like wildfire through unprotected sex. Some infected people have no symptoms at all, while others may experience burning with urination, and a swarm of other genital affections. If untreated gonorrhea can occasionally spread to affect joints or heart valves.
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Traditionally, treating gonorrhea has been easy with antibiotics. But resistance to antibiotics has grown dramatically in recent years. Strains of multidrug-resistant gonorrhea that do not respond to any available antibiotics have already been detected, the main cause for this being antibiotics overuse in trivial cases.
“Gonorrhea used to be susceptible to penicillin, ampicillin, tetracycline and doxycycline — very commonly used drugs,” said Jonathan Zenilman, who studies infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins. “But one by one, each of those antibiotics — and almost every new one that has come along since — eventually stopped working. One reason is that the bacterium that causes gonorrhea can mutate quickly to defend itself, Zenilman said.
In light of the drug resistance to gonorrhea, the new guidelines from the WHO advises that doctors treating gonorrhea patients cease to prescribe quinolones, a class of antibiotics previously effective in the treatment of gonorrhea. Now, doctors are advised to use cephalosporins, a different class of antibiotics.
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As for when antibiotic options will run out altogether, Teodora Wi of the WHO’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research tells the journal Science, “We will have to have new drugs in 5 years, I think.”
The U.S. government is spending millions of dollars through the CDC and National Institutes of Health to develop…
…new antibiotics and combat resistance.
The WHO also revised its guidelines for treating two other sexually transmitted infections, chlamydia and syphilis. Neither is facing severe antibiotic resistance. Syphilis, for example, can be treated with a single dose of penicillin, although there is a worldwide shortage of the drug.
Although all three sexually transmitted diseases affect both men and women, they can have particularly devastating effects on women if they are not treated. Gonorrhea can cause pelvic inflammatory disease and lead to dangerous ectopic pregnancies. Syphilis can pass from a pregnant woman to her fetus, and chlamydia can make it difficult for a woman to get pregnant.
For more on specific sexually transmitted infections, click here.