If you’ve been reading along, you might remember that in the past year, there has been increasing alarm in the public health community about rising rates of drug-resistant gonorrhea, an almost-beaten sexually transmitted disease that has steadily become resistant to just about all the drugs that can be used against it in the outpatient clinics on which STD control relies. (If you haven’t been reading along, then first, Welcome, and second, here are one two three four posts about the problem.)
Highly resistant gonorrhea — which is to say, gonorrhea that has already become resistant to sulfa drugs, penicillin, tetracycline, and fluoroquinolones such as Cipro, and that is gaining resistance to cephalosporins — first emerged in Japan and over the past decade was carried to the western United States, and then crossed the country. But a recent issue of EuroSurveillance, the journal of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, warns that cases are now increasing in Europe, and exhibiting resistance against the last drug that both worked and was uncomplicated to use.
