If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might have noticed a thread on health authorities’ growing concern over gonorrhea not responding to the drugs used against it. (And if you didn’t notice you can find those posts here.) A paper published Wednesday evening shows that worry has not been misplaced.
The concern is this: Treatment of STDs in infected people, and programs that aim to keep STDs from spreading from those people to others, rely on drugs that are inexpensive to buy, simple to administer, and work after a single dose and clinic visit. Since the late 1990s, there have been only two drugs that fulfill those criteria: an oral drug called cefixime and an injectable called ceftriaxone (both belonging to the same broader drug family called third-generation cephalosporins). Since the early 2000s, there have simultaneously been signs that resistance to cefixime has been spreading from the Pacific Rim — Japan and Hawaii — to North America, Europe and the rest of the world.