2012-08-11

New pandemic: gonorrhea?

Gonorrhea Needs To Be Treated By More-Potent Injections
Treatment options have shrunk as every medicine starting with penicillin loses effectiveness against gonorrhea, the second-most commonly reported infectious disease in the U.S. with about 700,000 new cases a year. The cefixime pill and the more-potent ceftriaxone injection belong to the only class of effective drugs left to use, the agency said in a report today.

“Action is urgently needed to prevent untreatable gonorrhea from becoming a reality,” said Gail Bolan, director of the Atlanta-based CDC’s division of sexually-transmitted disease prevention, in a telephone interview.
The CDC guidelines were last updated in 2007, when the bacteria demonstrated resistance to the fluoroquinolone class of medicines, and the agency recommended discontinuing their use. Cefixime and ceftriaxone are members of a family of drugs known as cephalosporins.

The increases in strains with less responsiveness to the cephalosporins were most prominent in samples from the western U.S. and from gay and bisexual men across the country. The same pattern existed when resistance to fluoroquinolones increased.
An STD pandemic is a two-fer for socionomics due to the changes it can induce in the culture. Rising STD resistance can lead to changes in sexual behavior that we are already likely to see as the culture moves farther from the grand supercycle peak.

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