STD news
Anne Gulland, Global health security correspondent
29 March 2018 •
The report of the first ever case of “super-gonorrhoea” - a bug which is resistant to frontline antibiotics - comes as no surprise to experts in sexually transmitted diseases.
Syphilis, HIV and a relatively new sexually transmitted disease - Mycoplasma genitalium - are also developing resistance to antimicrobial treatments.
Yesterday, Public Health England announced the world’s “worst ever” case of super-gonorrhea, contracted by a British man after a sexual encounter with a woman in South East Asia. The main antibiotic combination failed to cure the infection and doctors are hoping that one final treatment may work.
Infectious disease experts have long warned about the spread of drug-resistant gonorrhoea. A report by the World Health Organization last year revealed that gonorrhoea was becoming much harder to treat, with 77 countries reporting resistance to at least one antibiotic.
In 2016, WHO changed its gonorrhoea treatment guidelines, advising doctors to use a combination of the antibiotics azithromycin and ceftriaxone: this failed to work in the case of the British man and it is why doctors are so concerned. It is the standard treatment for gonorrhoea because so many other drugs have failed over the years.
Olwen Williams, a consultant in sexual health and president of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, said that this case had serious implications.
"This is a significant development because it shows that the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae has mutated a step further than we were anticipating," she said.
"If these two drugs aren't working we have to think what else we can use. One of the other antimicrobials we could use is spectinomycin but that is in very short supply," she said.
Dr Williams added that it was important to grow the gonorrhoea culture in the laboratory to determine which drugs it was resistant to.
"In some parts of the world they will test for gonorrhoea but will treat it without knowing what the sensitivities are. If you treat it blind - without knowing what it's resistant to - you can drive an epidemic," she said. | |
