Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — US public health officials say they have discovered two cases of gonorrhea, which appear to be a strain that does not respond to treatment with all available antibiotics.
This is the first time that antibiotic-resistant strains of gonorrhea have been identified in the United States.
Increased sexual activity during the pandemic, along with fewer people undergoing routine health screening, has led to an increase in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases around the world.
And those diseases, including gonorrhea, are becoming increasingly resistant to the antibiotics available to treat them, a problem that has become a serious public health threat.
Globally, antibiotic-resistant infections kill about 700,000 people each year. This number is expected to rise to 10 million deaths per year by 2050, if steps are not taken to stop the spread of resistant organisms.
“The concern was that this particular strain was spreading around the world, so it was only a matter of time before it hit the United States,” says Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, clinical professor of public health at the Keck School of Medicine at USC in Los Angeles.
“It’s a reminder that gonorrhea is becoming increasingly resistant and difficult to treat,” Klausner added. “We don’t have any new antibiotics. We haven’t had new antibiotics for gonorrhea in years, and we really need a different treatment strategy.”
Gonorrhea is transmitted through sexual contact and is one of the most common infections in the United States. It is caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which can infect the mucous membranes of the genitals, rectum, throat, and eyes.
People can be infected without showing symptoms. If left untreated, the infection can cause pelvic pain and infertility in women, and blindness in newborn babies.
In addition to low sensitivity to the antibiotic “ceftriaxone”, the strains of gonorrhea that were discovered in Massachusetts also showed low resistance to both “cefixime” and “azithromycin”.
The strains were resistant to the antibiotics ciprofloxacin, penicillin and tetracycline, according to a clinical alert sent to doctors by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
The Massachusetts Department of Public Health stated that it has not yet found any link between the two cases.
And in 2021, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended giving a double dose of the antibiotic “ceftriaxone” in an attempt to overcome the resistance of bacteria to this antibiotic, and this seems to have succeeded in these cases,
This antibiotic is the last line of defense against this infection, and experts say a new approach is needed.
Klausner hopes that the US Food and Drug Administration will give them the timing for a test that would tailor an antibiotic treatment based on the genetic susceptibility of the particular strain of gonorrhea that a person infects.
This is called resistance-targeted therapy, and Klausner says it’s effective for HIV, tuberculosis, and some other infections such as nosocomial infections, but it has never been tested for gonorrhea.
This strain of gonorrhea has previously been seen in Asia-Pacific countries and the United Kingdom, but not in the United States.
A common genetic marker for the two cases was also seen in Massachusetts and in a case in Nevada, although that strain retained its sensitivity to at least one class of antibiotics.
The first symptoms of gonorrhea infection often include painful urination, abdominal or pelvic pain, increased vaginal discharge, and vaginal bleeding between periods. However, most cases do not cause any symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control, which makes routine examinations important to detect infection.