Antibiotic Resistance Raises Concern About Untreatable Gonorrhoea

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As per the latest update, only one drug remains effective to treat sexually transmitted disease like Gonorrhoea but it looks like the bacteria will soon be able to evade it.

The first antibiotic to treat gonorrhoea was made available in 1930s. Since then, the bacteria has been able to build its own resistance against 7 types of antibiotics making them almost completely useless.

The study in this regard says that only one course of treatment is currently available to treat sexually transmitted infection (STI), that can easily be traced back to some earliest records of human history with almost 80 million cases globally, as per W.H.O.

But the recent years have seen gonorrhoea “superbugs” having the capability to build resistance against most antibiotics used. Due to this, health officials fear that soon they have a kind of untreatable gonorrhoea.

This is possible unless the use of antibiotic is monitored somewhat more carefully so that the future course of treatment can be well developed.

A WHO medical officer named Dr Teodora Wi has to say that more controlled antibiotics use and widely available diagnostic tests need to be made available to combat the SIT.

She further adds that this is the time for the world to act when the antibiotic ceftriaxone will no longer be effective to treat a sexually transmitted disease.

She also said, “Gonorrhoea has been around since the Bible, it will work out a way to survive,” she said.

There are 3 main types of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhoea. Out of them, gonorrhoea is known to have developed the greatest resistance against most antibiotics.

Although, the infection causes somewhat low risk of death, it can cause inflammation with pain. If it goes untreated, the infection can become the reason of miscarriage and other fertility issues.

Currently, medical experts are running out of potential treatments. Due to the above problem, medical experts in the US and UK are no longer prescribing ceftriaxone with azithromycin. It’s mainly because of the increasing resistance to these antibiotics.

Infections that are not getting any response to antibiotics. This is what one of the medical experts in the UK said who believes that Super-gonorrhoea is quite rare and will be harder to treat in the future.

Antibiotic resistant strains have been are more commonly found in Asia for decades. But now, UK has detected as many as 12 ceftriaxone-resistant strains since 2016. Out of them 3 were detected this year only.

Robert Nicholas, a biomedical researcher at the University of North Carolina says there are two lines of treatments that are already in the development phase. One is zoliflodacin and the other one is gepotidacin. It’s a drug developed by pharmaceutical company GSK.

 

 

Also Read: CDC Warns Parechovirus to Cause Seizures & Death In Infants; Circulating In Multiple States

 

 

 

Source: FT.com