CDC Warning: Running out of drugs to treat Gonorrhea

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are sounding the alarm about antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea, which threatens to pose a “major public health challenge” in the coming years. Over the last three decades, this common sexually transmitted infection has increasingly failed to respond to the drugs used to treat it — which means the thousands of Americans infected with gonorrhea every year are running out of options.

Now, a cocktail of two antibiotics is the last effective treatment we have against the STD. But, there are already some signs that those last resort antibiotics may not be able to hang on for long. Last year, researchers in Canada found that nearly seven percent of patients at a Toronto clinic were infected with a form of the disease that didn’t respond to any drugs at all. As the number of available treatments dwindles, that emerging resistance “could have even more substantial health and economic consequences,” the CDC researchers write.

Both genders are more at risk for contracting HIV if their gonorrhea goes untreated. The National Coalition of STD Directors believes it could be a matter of just another year or two before untreatable gonorrhea spreads throughout the country.

The full article can be found HERE.

(Thanks Toby)

~Lacey
Follow Lacey on Twitter here

93660cookie-checkCDC Warning: Running out of drugs to treat Gonorrhea

CDC Warning: Running out of drugs to treat Gonorrhea

Share This

19 Responses

  1. I saw many posing the question on Reddit: Why can’t we go back to original treatments? In other words does bacteria store resistance to all antibiotics over all time? It seems like the bacteria would over time and mutation lose it’s resistance to less recent treatments. I’m just posing the question. Maybe it does store some resistance to anything ever tried.

  2. Gonorrea isn’t like a game of Risk where you get finite armies to seek and conquer your opponent…it is a bacterium that mutated to defeat the body’s natural defenses then being a smart living bugger it did it again and again and once its infinite armies learn a trick or two …they don’t forget or get taken with the roll of a die.

    FYI…if you have serious questions about disease…check with your doc or do a simple search then click of the picks that have reliable info.

  3. @erik

    Maybe this will help your geek forum theorem…ask if they would use pre I Love You (2000) Antivirus code and expect it to work on the mutated Trojans from then

  4. Its a shame that one of the main purposes of the ‘industry’ testing system is to keep the secret of just how rampant stds are in the industry.

    There would be no more perfect group of people to provide a study group for research regarding this issue. But to use this group of people for any research project would mean that an outside agency would have all of the industry secrets regarding std’s, and the industry just cant have that.

    No doubt some research facility would pay huge for this opportunity, but keeping secrets is more important to the industry than the health of performers, and that is just a shame. And the fact that perfrormers dont give a shit is even a bigger shame.

  5. There was also news of the first female to female transmission of HIV confirmed yesterday… I haven’t had a chance to do a write up on it yet, but it is quite interesting…

  6. Lol laura…I Love You was an email virus that invaded and essentially wiped out your system…and every system that opened or previewed the email. Mike could probably explain better than I why it’s famous …too many lunches where the geek speak made my eyes roll & spin into brain saying bwwwwaaaaahhhh? Wtf 🙂

    Can say without a doubt…it isn’t a mistake that “replicating” computer code is called a virus.

  7. Damn? Wtf that doesn’t explain it..come on now tell the folks why Melissa was as popular as antibiotic resistant gonorrea 🙂

  8. Haha… this brings me back to the Y2K days.
    I just remember being at some huge New Year’s Eve party and trying to drink as much as I could so if the technological world exploded or the world went up in flames or something, I would be too fucked up to care… I was too young to know any better.

    But, I DO remember the “I Love You” virus!! That shit was crazy.

  9. @Lurk….oh I do have a slight recollection of this… I didn’t remember the name “I love you” but thanks for putting it in context…I also kinda remember the whole Y2K fiasco @ Lacey… I must not have been very tech centered because its all such a vague memory…. must have been the 80’s…..lol … I did read about the reported Female-to-female transmission yesterday….apparently it’s usually hard to confirm…in this case the infected person hadn’t had sex with a man in 10 years and didn’t have any other risk factors other then a positive female partner.

  10. @laura b –
    I know.. the amount of data they have on this case is quite amazing.. years and years worth. I need to read up on it a little more… I’m actually interested to know whether anal penetration with toys was documented… I know they routinely used the same toys on each other during sex, but I haven’t seen anything yet that specifies whether vaginal only or vaginal/anal.

    I did read they routinely used toys very roughly to the point of bleeding though…. but, that’s really not all *that* hard to do these days…

  11. @Lacey….yea I read that too about the rough toy play…and also that they had sex sometimes when menstruating….but probably not oral at that time im guessing…. I can see the sharing toy play maybe being a issue if they both had an open sore or scratch, but thats a lot of things needing to line up.

  12. Have you come across anything re the positive being on meds or maintaining an undetectable viral load? Lots of info about varied & higher viral loads in semen/ vaginal fluid than blood plasma but haven’t seen anything that mentions higher risk during menses.

    Makes sense that some type of abrasion facilitated the transmission? The mouths natural defenses make oral to oral unlikely but doesn’t rule out oral/vaginal oral/anal or any other combo with dual penetration toys and unnoticed abrasions.

  13. Same Here Lurk, I’ve never heard mentioned higher risk during menses before…. which actually seems a bit counter intuitive to me… still blood plasma right?…. as for the meds, it was reported that the positive partner stopped taking her meds two years ago, thus maybe the high vaginal fluid viral load…I didn’t know that it may carry a higher load then blood…

  14. @jilted…yes a complete shame… we could learn a lot about transmission if that were the case… it all leads back to fear of the condom and regulations I believe…. im curious, would the people that object to watching condoms in porn…also object to condom porn that has been virtually removed?…. I hear mention that cost is a big determent for virtual removal, but how much can it cost?… I can picture a bunch of young techie guys clamoring to volunteer for the job.

  15. OMG!!!….just read a couple of Rob Black Blog posts on Adultfyi for the first time….WHAT AN ASSHOLE!!!

Leave a Reply