CDC Says Gonorrhea has become a Super Bug and Is now Drug-Resistant
Pastor Dale Morgan
Apr 12, 6:10 PM EDT
*CDC Says Gonorrhea has become a Super Bug and Is now Drug-Resistant*
By DANIEL YEE
Associated Press Writer
ATLANTA (AP) -- The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea is now among
the "superbugs" resistant to common antibiotics, leading U.S. health
officials to recommend wider use of a different class of drugs to avert
a public health crisis.
The resistant form accounts for more than one in every four gonorrhea
cases among heterosexual men in Philadelphia and nearly that many in San
Francisco, according to a survey that led to Thursday's recommendation
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gonorrhea, which is believed to infect more than 700,000 people in the
United States each year, can leave both men and women infertile and puts
people at higher risk of getting the AIDS virus.
Since the early 1990s, a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolones has
provided a relatively easy cure. These antibiotics, taken as tablets,
include the drug Cipro.
But a growing number of gonorrhea cases is resistant to those drugs, and
officials at the CDC for the first time are urging doctors to stop using
fluoroquinolones and switch to cephalosporins, a different class of
antibiotics, to treat everyone.
Those drugs - which include the generic ceftriaxone or brand name
Rocephin, made by Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG - must be given as a
shot and aren't as readily stocked as Cipro on most doctor's shelves.
"Gonorrhea has now joined the list of other superbugs for which
treatment options have become dangerously few," said Dr. Henry Masur,
president of the Infectious Disease Society of America. "To make a bad
problem even worse, we're also seeing a decline in the development of
new antibiotics to treat these infections."
The CDC made the new recommendation after discovering that nearly 7
percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in a survey of 26 U.S.
cities last year were drug-resistant. In 2001, only about 0.6 percent of
gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men were drug-resistant.
"That leaves us with a single class of highly effective antibiotics,"
said Dr. John Douglas Jr., director of the CDC's division of STD
prevention. Other experts called the situation perilous.
"We are running out of options to treat this disease," added Douglas,
who said there are "no new drugs for gonorrhea in the drug development
pipeline."
Previously, CDC recommended against fluoroquinolones to treat
drug-resistant gonorrhea among men who have sex with men and in certain
states, including California and Hawaii where most of these cases were
turning up.
Described by Douglas as a "very wily" disease, gonorrhea has worked its
way through decades of other treatment regimens, from sulfa drugs used
in the 1930s and 1940s, to penicillin, which was used from the 1940s
until the mid-1980s.
Gonorrhea, spread through sexual contact, is the second most commonly
reported infectious disease in the United States, trailing only
chlamydia, which the CDC says affects more than 2.1 million people
yearly in the U.S.
The highest rates of infection are among sexually active teens, young
adults and African-Americans. Because many people don't have obvious
symptoms, they can unknowingly spread it to others. And having it makes
people more susceptible to HIV. Gonorrhea's spread is preventable
through consistent and proper use of condoms, experts said.
In women, the infection can cause pelvic inflammatory disease. In men,
it can cause epididymitis, a painful condition of the testicles that can
lead to infertility if untreated, the CDC said.
In the survey of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in 26 cities
last year, Philadelphia had the highest percentage of drug-resistant
cases with almost 27 percent, a dramatic increase from only 1.2 percent
in 2004.
San Francisco's drug-resistant cases more than doubled between 2004 and
2006, from 10.3 percent to 22.5 percent. During the same period, Miami's
cases spiked from 2.1 percent to 15.3 percent and Atlanta's climbed from
1 percent to 5.7 percent.
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On the Net:
CDC info: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr