One STD is Becoming ‘Smarter’ and Harder to Treat, according to WHO

July 7, 2017

Site Staff,

Gonorrhea Bacteria

(CNN) – Gonorrhea is becoming hard and in some cases impossible to treat with antibiotics, the World Health Organization said.

“The bacteria that cause gonorrhea are particularly smart. Every time we use a new class of antibiotics to treat the infection, the bacteria evolve to resist them,” said Teodora Wi, a human reproduction specialist at WHO, in a news release.

Three super bugs – bacteria that cannot be killed by the best available drug – were detected in Japan, France, and Spain, according to the WHO.

“We need to be more vigilant now,” Wi told reporters in a phone briefing.

Each year, about 78 million people worldwide are infected with gonorrhea, the WHO said. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there are 820,000 new gonorrhea infections each year.

Data from 77 countries collected by WHO shows there is a widespread resistance to older, cheaper antibiotics and in some countries, the infection has become “untreatable by all known antibiotics,” the international health organization said in the news release.

Earlier this year, gonorrhea was named among 11 types of bacteria that health experts believe pose the greatest threats to human health because they are in urgent need of new antibiotics.

Marc Sprenger, WHO’s director of antimicrobial resistance, said there’s an urgent need for drugs and tests to prevent, diagnose, and treat gonorrhea.

More specifically, Sprenger said, the health community needs new antibiotics, a long term vaccine to prevent the infection and tests that will predict with accuracy if an antibiotic will work on a particular infection.

Gonorrhea has developed resistance to nearly every class of antibiotics used to treat it such as penicillin, tetracycline and fluoroquinolones, the CDC said.

“It’s important to understand that ever since antibiotics appeared on the scene, Neisseria gonorrhoeae has been fairly quick in developing resistance to all the classes of antibiotics that have been thrown at it,” Manica Balasegaram, director of the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, told reporters.

From 2009-2014 the WHO says that several countries discovered a widespread resistance to drugs used to treat gonorrhea like ciprofloxacin, azithromycin and even last resort treatments such as extended-spectrum cephalosporins (ESCs), the health organization said.

In 2016, the organization began advising doctors to switch to a two-drug combination: ceftriaxone and azithromycin after more than 50 countries reported that ESCs were no longer effective in some cases.