Prevention will increasingly remain the only strategy. The upshot is that we can expect gonorrhoea to become progressively harder to treat over the next five years, unless new drugs are developed. The new strain seems to be capable of passing its resistance quickly when grown in culture with other strains, increasing their resistance 500-fold. Traditionally, southeast Asia has developed resistant isolates, which have subsequently spread across the Pacific to the US. The problem of ever-growing resistance to antibiotics among various strains of bacteria is often underestimated, despite the fact that this is a global and very serious problem. Dr Unemo’s statement follows just three days after a recent report emanating from the CDC that US gonorrhea was proving increasingly less susceptible to frontline drugs, including cephalosporins. Super gonorrhoea and antibiotic resistance. At present CDC (the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) recommends treatment with a cephalosporin and either azithromycin or doxycycline. This development is “alarming”, since cephalosporins are the last line of defence but also “predictable”, given that gonorrhoea has progressively developed resistance to all the drugs used against it – first, to penicillin and tetracycline, and subsequently, since the early 80s, to fluoroquinolines. Dr Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria reported on his work with Japanese colleagues to characterize the new strain which has proved resistant to all the current frontline drugs, including cephalosporins. The drug resistant strains of gonorrhea and similar infections such as MRSA have been attributed to overuse of antibiotics, and experts have long warned that the issue will only worsen in coming years.

Two issues discussed at the recent ISSTDR (International Society Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research) for Conference (11th-14th July) in Montreal, Canada, have made the headlines.įirst, the emergence in Japan of a new drug resistant “superbug” – an apparently untreatable strain of Gonorrhea (H041). The super-strain of gonorrhea is known as HO41 and is part of a rising trend of bacterial infections growing resistant to available antibiotics. A New Untreatable Super Strain Of Gonorrhea Is Spreading Around The World.

Super strain gonorrhea