Resistant strains have now emerged against every class of antibiotic and doctors are down to their last available treatment: a dual therapy that combines azithromycin, an antibiotic in pill form, and ceftriaxone, an injectable. The World Health Organization says as many as 110 million people are infected each year and when left untreated, infections can lead to painful complications, infertility, or even death, in rare cases.Īnd as a superbug, gonorrhea is particularly super. "Ultimately, the future of humanity may depend on our ability to respond to the great challenges of antimicrobial resistance," said Peter Thomson, president of the 71 t UN General Assembly.īut among the many villains populating the superbug universe, Neisseria gonorrhoeae is a particularly worrisome character.įor starters, gonorrhea is the second-most common sexually-transmitted bacterial disease, after chlamydia. Last month, the United Nations held a historic meeting to discuss the superbug crisis, which the World Health Organization calls a "slow-motion tsunami. "It begs the question: What will gonorrhea look like in the new world?"Īntimicrobial resistance is now widely recognized as a major global health problem that threatens to reverse medical advances and cripple economies, particularly in the developing world. "But now the concern is that we could go back to a time when we'll have to be hospitalized or use very antiquated and mechanical treatments. Vanessa Allen, chief medical microbiologist with Public Health Ontario. "Gonorrhea has mostly (become) a nuisance infection," said Dr. Mercifully, such remedies are only found in the history books and for more than 80 years, gonorrhea infections have been cured - painlessly - with antibiotics.īut with the rise of drug-resistant superbugs, and sexually transmitted disease rates rebounding around the world, doctors are once again worrying about a threat that they haven't had to face since pre-war times: untreatable gonorrhea. For men suffering from "chordee" - a complication where the penis becomes curved - one 19th-century doctor recommended placing the organ on a table and striking "a violent blow with a book." Previously: Did You Get VD Last Year? A Lot of People in S.F.Before antibiotics, many "treatments" for gonorrhea were more cringe-inducing than the disease: mercury injections in the urethra, for example, or hot water flushed into a woman's genital tract. So you really don't want this clap.Īlso, at some point, this might mean we have incurable gonorrhea. last year, which is up from 1,900 cases in 2010, but down from 17,000 cases per year back in the mid-70s.īut our clap is super-aggressive clap, and the drug companies aren't working fast enough to create new antibiotics to fight it, meaning it's no longer the easiest to cure of the STDs. There were 2,300 new reported cases of the clap in S.F. It's interesting to note that since the sexual revolution heyday of the 1970s, the rate of gonorrhea infection has dropped significantly. And one of the arguments against using PrEP in this way is that it creates more opportunity for the spread of other STDs, including chlamydia (currently the most common STD in the nation), syphilis, and gonorrhea a drop in condom use is being blamed for that 30-times figure among gay men. But among sexually active gay men in particular, a new debate is raging about the option of taking Truvada, or Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in order to prevent HIV infection without the use of condoms. One thing that people contracting gonorrhea are likely not using is a condom, which would help slow the spread of the disease in these populations.
The two groups most likely to contract the pernicious strain, or gonorrhea in general, are black adolescents and gay men, with gay men contracting the disease at a rate of more than 30 times that of the rest of the population. Department of Public Health Director Barbara Garcia seems to be one of the sources of this speculation, writing in a May 20 report that "San Francisco, along with other cities on the West Coast of the U.S., is a site of possible emergence of drug-resistant gonorrhea."
This one strain was thought to have originated in "California or Hawaii" in 2006, and now health experts are pointing the finger at San Francisco specifically as the likely source, as the Examiner and KTVU are reporting.
Talk about antibiotic-resistant strains goes back a while, and gonorrhea has a habit of evolving quickly to outwit our drugs. Well, now they say that a particularly stubborn and resistant strain may have originated here in our slutty city.
Last year the talk was about syphilis being on the rise in S.F., and across the country a new, antibiotic-resistant strain of the clap was making headlines too.
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