New Gonorrhea Superbug Discovered in Japan

[Revan]

So I know this is usually more for people and their health questions, but I think this is the best place to post this.

Gonorrhea superbug resistant to all antibiotics - thestar.com

Gonorrhea superbug resistant to all antibiotics
Posted on Monday July 11, 2011

A superbug strain of gonorrhea that’s resistant to all available antibiotics has been discovered in Japan, posing a potential threat to public health worldwide, infectious disease experts say.

An international team of researchers identified the highly drug-resistant strain of Neisseria gonorrhoeae — the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted infection — through genetic analysis.

Dubbed H041, the strain has extreme resistance to all cephalosporin-class antibiotics, the last remaining drugs still effective in treating gonorrhea.

“This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery,” researcher Dr. Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, said in a statement. “Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it.

“While it is still too early to assess if this new strain has become widespread, the history of newly emergent resistance in the bacterium suggests that it may spread rapidly unless new drugs and effective treatment programs are developed,” said Unemo, who presented the team’s findings Monday at the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research meeting in Quebec City.

A spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada said the federal agency is not aware of any cases of H041 strain in this country.

Gonorrhea is one of the most common STIs in the world and can cause infertility, increase HIV transmission, and have profound effects on infants born to infected mothers, including blindness. Left untreated, the disease can be fatal.

Dr. Vanessa Allen, a medical microbiologist at the Ontario Agency for Health Protection and Promotion, said she’s not surprised by the emergence of a superbug gonorrhea strain because the infectious agent is known to exchange genetic material with other organisms in the genital tract, which helps confer resistance.

There’s been a long history of Neisseria gonorrhoeae losing its susceptibility to drugs used to treat it, including the penicillin class of antibiotics first introduced about 70 years ago.

“And, in fact, we’re now on the fifth or six class of antimicrobials,” Allen said Monday from Quebec City, where she was attending the conference.

Cephalosporins, which are administered in pill or a more potent intravenous form, are the latest to lose their ability to wipe out infection caused by the new strain.

With no alternative drugs in the pharmaceutical pipeline, “the concern is that we’ll go to potentially an era where it will be like the pre-antibiotic era,” she said. “So people again will see consequences of chronic gonorrhea infection that are associated with neonatal infections, infertility and those things.”

So guys and gals, even though it's over there right now, please play safe. If this comes over from Japan, it could be a much higher risk for sexually-active teens. Who knows, maybe they could find a cure eventually, but the way it's sounding, this could almost be another HIV-like thing, and of course catching gonorrhea as it is makes you more susceptible to HIV.

[dl72]

Thanks for the info. Yes I heard about it before.

[Pseudojim]

Originally Posted by Revan

Who knows, maybe they could find a cure eventually, but the way it's sounding, this could almost be another HIV-like thing, and of course catching gonorrhoea as it is makes you more susceptible to HIV.

It certainly won't be HIV-like, it affects the body in a much less devastating way and won't ever have anywhere near as high a morbidity or mortality rate, regardless of antibiotic resistance, thankfully.

As far as HIV susceptibility goes, gonorrhoea and HIV may have a correlated relationship, often going hand in hand, but not necessarily a causative one: the same correlation holds true of all other common STDs too; people who have high-risk sex are far more likely to contract more than one STD (including HIV) because of their behaviour exposing them to multiple diseases, which they in turn may spread all or some of to others. "Nearly 50% of people infected with gonorrhea also are infected with chlamydia" says wiki. I don't think any of them really increase HIV sensitivity more or less than a case of the sniffles or a bit of food poisoning.