Beware of Untreatable Gonorrhea!
“Gonorrhea is putting up increasing resistance to the last antibiotic class highly effective against it, the CDC has again warned.
The prevalence of gonorrhea resistant to the cephalosporin cefixime (Suprax) was just 0.1% in 2006 but had jumped 17-fold to 1.7% as of mid-2011, Gail A. Bolan, MD, director of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the CDC in Atlanta, and colleagues reported.
That rate is up from 1.4% in 2010, as the CDC reported last year when it first warned about cephalosporin resistance.
The CDC has typically changed gonorrhea treatment recommendations once the prevalence of resistance tops 5% in its surveillance of infections, but there aren’t any agents left to switch to, Bolan’s group wrote in a perspective article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
‘It is time to sound the alarm,’ they wrote. ‘There is much to do and the threat of untreatable gonorrhea is emerging rapidly.’
Because of resistance to other classes, the CDC currently recommends only third-generation cephalosporins for gonorrhea treatment. This class of drugs remains highly effective against most gonorrhea strains U.S. clinicians are likely to see, and should still be used, the group noted.”
