Super Gonorrhea Strain Prompts Public Health Officials To Discourage All But One Drug

A drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea that has emerged as a serious threat to public health has docs urging that all treatments saved for one not be used, due to the fact they could be rendered ineffective by using them for the aggressive infection.

As we reported earlier, the super-strain of gonorrhea has public health officials concerned due to the fact that doctors are rapidly running out of ways to treat the common illness. Terrifyingly, the CDC’s STD head Dr. Gail Bolen told a news outlet earlier this week:

“Cephalosporin-resistant gonorrhea could potentially mean untreatable gonorrhea. Untreatable gonorrhea is a real possibility.”

In recent decades, we’ve taken sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis more for granted due to the fact treatments existed to resolve the infections — unlike HIV and herpes, which present lifelong issues for sufferers.

But scarily now experts are urging doctors stay away from all but one treatment for gonorrhea as researchers work to develop an alternate plan of attack for the new and less-treatable form of gonorrhea, known in common parlance as “the clap.”

Bolan, who heads up the CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Disease Prevention division, explained to reporters that it is important to preserve the last lines of defense in treatment of gonorrhea as we wait for new therapies to be developed:

“The change in antibiotic treatment guidelines we are making today is a critical pre-emptive strike to preserve the last effective treatment option… This will not solve the problem of drug-resistant gonorrhea once and for all, but it may buy us time to allow researchers and drug developers to develop new treatments.”

The Centers For Disease Control is working closely with the World Health Organization to keep tabs on the drug-resistant gonorrhea issue as it persists worldwide.