Drug-Resistant STD (Gonorrhea)

[exlurker]

A reminder -- and another reason -- to be careful, please:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...041201497.html

Excerpts from article:

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is spreading rapidly across the United States, federal health officials reported today, raising alarm about doctors' ability to treat the common sexually transmitted infection.
New data from 26 U.S. cities found the number of resistant gonorrhea cases is rising dramatically, jumping from less than 1 percent of all gonorrhea cases to more than 13 percent in less than five years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
The spread of resistant gonorrhea prompted the CDC to advise doctors to immediately stop using Cipro and other antibiotics in its class, which have been the first line of defense against gonorrhea, and resort to an older class of drugs to ensure patients are cured and do not spread the stubborn infection.
"We've lost the ability to use what had been the most reliable class of antibiotics," said John M. Douglas Jr., who heads the CDC's division of sexually transmitted diseases prevention. "This is necessary to protect both public and private health."
. . . "Gonorrhea has now joined the list of other superbugs for which treatment options have become dangerously few," said Henry Masur, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America.
Gonorrhea's resistance was probably caused by the same problem that led to resistance of other organisms -- the casual use of antibiotics in the United States and overseas, which cause pathogens to mutate, Douglas and others said.
Resistant strains of the bacteria that cause gonorrhea were first detected in Asia. Resistant gonorrhea then apparently spread to Hawaii and California, before emerging elsewhere around the United States . . . . The resistance appears to be widespread around the country, with particularly sharp increases occurring in some cities. In Philadelphia, the rate jumped from 1.2 to 26.6 percent. In Miami, it increased from 2.1 to 15.3 percent. . . .
The news comes as the rate of new gonorrhea infections has started rising in some Western states. . . .