Federal health officials took steps Thursday to head off the emergence of a new gonorrhea “superbug” that’s resistant to standard antibiotics.
Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease that infects 700,000 Americans a year, already has become resistant to all but one class of antibiotics and could soon become untreatable, federal health officials warned. Doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new treatment guidelines, hoping to delay the inevitable day when standard drugs no longer work. The guidelines call for withholding a potent oral antibiotic now commonly used to treat the infection. Instead, doctors should use an injectable form to which the gonorrhea bacteria seems less likely to develop resistance, along with a second type of antibiotic pills.
“Gonorrhea for years has developed resistance to every antibiotic we’ve thrown at it,” says Kimberly Workowski, an infectious-disease expert at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Now, “we’re at the end of the line on standard therapies,” says P. Frederick Sparling, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Gonorrhea is a major cause of infertility among women. It increases the risk that people will be infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and that they will spread it to their partners, according to the CDC.
As recently as 2007, doctors could treat gonorrhea with a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones, which include the drug Ciprofloxacin, or Cipro. Now, those drugs no longer work for gonorrhea. Instead, doctors have turned to a class of drugs called cephalosporins, also used to treat serious conditions such as bacterial meningitis and salmonella poisoning, says Sparling.
Yet even these antibiotics may not be useful for long, he says. Read full article.
