Prometheus 6

Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Forces Treatment Change
The CDC says the major antibiotics used to the treat gonorrhea are no longer effective. Now there’s only one therapy left.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Mary Carmichael
Newsweek
Updated: 1:51 p.m. ET April 12, 2007

April 12, 2007 - For sexually active Americans, gonorrhea has always cast a frightening shadow—almost 340,000 cases are reported each year, and at least that many may go unreported or undiagnosed. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the situation just got even scarier. The agency announced Thursday that it will no longer recommend a major class of antibiotics used to cure gonorrhea, a group of drugs called fluoroquinolones, also known as quinolones, because strains of the bacteria have become resistant to them and are circulating throughout the nation. Since doctors started treating gonorrhea in the 1940s, the disease has developed resistance against almost every antibiotic used, including penicillin and tetracycline; it is now unresponsive to all previously recommended drugs except one last group called cephalosporins. Someday, it may evolve resistance to those, too. NEWSWEEK’s Mary Carmichael spoke with Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDC’s Division of Sexually Transmitted Diseases Prevention. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: A primary treatment for gonorrhea no longer works in more than 13 percent of cases surveyed by the CDC. What about the other 87 percent? Should those patients keep taking quinolones, or do the CDC's new recommendations apply to them as well?
John Douglas: For all practical purposes, the new recommendation affects everybody. The reason is that most of the time patients don’t know what strain they have. The old clinical tests for gonorrhea, where you grow bacteria in a culture and see what it takes to kill it, could tell you whether a strain was resistant or not. But most clinics have replaced those tests with more convenient methods that don’t have the capacity to test for antibiotic susceptibility. So people don’t usually know if they’re in the 13 percent or the 87 percent.