Antibiotic-resistant sexually-transmitted infection leads to WHO warning
One of the most common sexually-transmitted diseases is becoming harder, and sometimes impossible to treat, the World Health Organization warns, as the bacteria causing the illness is learning to fight antibiotics.
The World Health Organization warns that, data from 77 countries shows that gonorrhoea, a common sexually-transmitted disease, is becoming harder and even impossible to treat due to antibiotic-resistance.
“The bacteria that cause gonorrhoea are particularly smart. Every time we use a new class of antibiotics to treat the infection, the bacteria evolve to resist them,” said Dr Teodora Wi, Medical Officer, Human Reproduction, at WHO.
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The bacteria is especially resistant to older classes of antibiotics by reports from high-income countries show that in some instances, the pathogen does not respond even to newer drugs and the diseases has become untreatable by all known antibiotics.
“These cases may just be the tip of the iceberg, since systems to diagnose and report untreatable infections are lacking in lower-income countries where gonorrhoea is actually more common,” adds Dr Wi.
According to WHO data, an estimated 78 million people are infected with gonorrhoea and the complications disproportionally affect women, leading to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility, as well as an increased risk of HIV.
Decreasing condom use, increased urbanisation and travel, poor infection detection rates, and inadequate or failed treatment all contribute to this increase, the WHO warns.
Another problem is the fact that there is too little research into developing new treatments. Currently, there are only 3 new candidate drugs in various stages of clinical development: solithromycin, for which a phase III trial has recently been completed; zoliflodacin, which has completed a phase II trial; and gepotidacin, which has also completed a phase II trial.
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