Drug-resistant gonorrhea is a growing problem—one that doesn't heed borders.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13750213

Drug-resistant gonorrhea is a growing problem—one that doesn’t heed borders.

Health officials have long warned that gonorrhea is becoming more and more resistant to all the antibiotic drugs we have to fight it. Last year, the US reached a grim landmark: For the first time, two unrelated people in Massachusetts were found to have gonorrhea infections with complete or reduced susceptibility to every drug in our arsenal, including the frontline drug ceftriaxone. Luckily, they were still able to be cured with high-dose injections of ceftriaxone. But, as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bluntly notes: “Little now stands between us and untreatable gonorrhea.”

If public health alarm bells could somehow hit a higher pitch, a study published Thursday from researchers in China would certainly accomplish it. The study surveyed gonorrhea bacterial isolates—Neisseria gonorrhoeae—from around the country and found that the prevalence of ceftriaxone-resistant isolates nearly tripled between 2017 and 2021. Ceftriaxone-resistant strains made up roughly 8 percent of the nearly 3,000 bacterial isolates collected from gonorrhea infections in 2022. That’s up from just under 3 percent in 2017. The study appears in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

While those single-digit percentages may seem low, compared to other countries they’re extremely high. In the US, for instance, the prevalence of ceftriaxone-resistant strains never went above 0.2 percent between 2017 and 2021, according to the CDC. In Canada, ceftriaxone-resistance was stable at 0.6 percent between 2017 and 2021. The United Kingdom had a prevalence of 0.21 percent in 2022.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Ceftriaxone is currently the first-line treatment for gonorrhea because Neisseria gonorrhoeae has spent the past several decades building up resistance to pretty much everything else.

    By the 1990s, the CDC was forced to switch to a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones, including ciprofloxacin (Cipro).

    In 2010, the CDC updated the treatment again, recommending that doctors combine cephalosporins with one of two other types of antibiotics—azithromycin or doxycycline—to try to thwart the development of resistance.

    Also, the researchers didn’t have detailed case data that might help identify specific risk factors for resistance development, such as the antibiotic treatments patients had.

    “These findings underscore the urgent need for a comprehensive approach to address antibiotic-resistant N. gonorrhoeae in China, including identifying factors contributing to this high resistance rate, especially in provinces where the percentage of gonococcal isolates resistant to ceftriaxone is >10 percent,” the authors write.

    But they also note that this is not just an alarming finding for China but also a “pressing public health concern” for the entire world.

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