Plagues,
Pestilences and Diseases
10 October 2011 Last updated at 07:12 ET
UK doctors advised superbug strain of gonorrhoea has turned
drug resistant
By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News
UK doctors are being told the antibiotic normally used to treat
gonorrhoea is no longer effective because the sexually transmitted
disease is now largely resistant to it.
The Health Protection Agency says we may be heading to a point
when the disease is incurable unless new treatments can be found.
For now, doctors must stop using the usual treatment cefixime and
instead use two more powerful antibiotics.
One is a pill and the other a jab.
The HPA say the change is necessary because of increasing
resistance.
Untreatable strains
Tests on samples taken from patients and grown in the laboratory
showed reduced susceptibility to the usual antibiotic cefixime in
nearly 20% of cases in 2010, compared with just 10% of cases in
2009.
“This presents the very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in
the future” - Prof Cathy Ison HPA
As recently as 2005, no gonorrhoea bacteria with reduced
susceptibility to cefixime could be found in the UK.
The bacterium that causes the infection - Neisseria gonorrhoeae -
has an unusual ability to adapt itself and has gained resistance,
or reduced susceptibility, to a growing list of antibiotics -
first penicillin itself, then tetracyclines, ciprofloxacin and now
cefixime.
The World Health Organization recommends that the first-line
antibiotic used is changed when treatment failure in patients
reaches 5%.
But for cefixime, the change is being made pre-emptively, owing to
the alarming rise in resistance that is emerging.
Prof Cathy Ison, a gonorrhoea expert at England's HPA, said: "Our
lab tests have shown a dramatic reduction in the sensitivity of
the drug we were using as the main treatment for gonorrhoea. This
presents the very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in the
future.
"We were so worried by the results we were seeing that we
recommended that guidelines on the treatment of gonorrhoea were
revised in May this year, to recommend a more effective drug.
"But this won't solve the problem, as history tells us that
resistance to this therapy will develop too. In the absence of any
new alternative treatments for when this happens, we will face a
situation where gonorrhoea cannot be cured."
She said patients who refuse the jab will be offered oral
antibiotics instead.
She added: "This highlights the importance of practising safe sex,
as, if new antibiotic treatments can't be found, this will be only
way of controlling this infection in the future."
After genital chlamydia, gonorrhoea is the second most common
bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the UK.