Incurable gonorrhea may be next superbug

[waltky]

Dat's why Granny tells Uncle Ferd not to mess `round with dem Hispexican womens...

UK doctors advised gonorrhoea has turned drug resistant
10 October 2011 - UK gonorrhoea rates had been declining in recent years until a slight increase in 2010

UK doctors are being told the antibiotic normally used to treat gonorrhoea is no longer effective because the sexually transmitted disease is now largely resistant to it. The Health Protection Agency says we may be heading to a point when the disease is incurable unless new treatments can be found. For now, doctors must stop using the usual treatment cefixime and instead use two more powerful antibiotics. One is a pill and the other a jab. The HPA say the change is necessary because of increasing resistance.

Untreatable strains

Tests on samples taken from patients and grown in the laboratory showed reduced susceptibility to the usual antibiotic cefixime in nearly 20% of cases in 2010, compared with just 10% of cases in 2009. As recently as 2005, no gonorrhoea bacteria with reduced susceptibility to cefixime could be found in the UK. The bacterium that causes the infection - Neisseria gonorrhoeae - has an unusual ability to adapt itself and has gained resistance, or reduced susceptibility, to a growing list of antibiotics - first penicillin itself, then tetracyclines, ciprofloxacin and now cefixime.

The World Health Organization recommends that the first-line antibiotic used is changed when treatment failure in patients reaches 5%. But for cefixime, the change is being made pre-emptively, owing to the alarming rise in resistance that is emerging. Prof Cathy Ison, a gonorrhoea expert at England's HPA, said: "Our lab tests have shown a dramatic reduction in the sensitivity of the drug we were using as the main treatment for gonorrhoea. This presents the very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in the future. "We were so worried by the results we were seeing that we recommended that guidelines on the treatment of gonorrhoea were revised in May this year, to recommend a more effective drug.

"But this won't solve the problem, as history tells us that resistance to this therapy will develop too. In the absence of any new alternative treatments for when this happens, we will face a situation where gonorrhoea cannot be cured." She said patients who refuse the jab will be offered oral antibiotics instead. She added: "This highlights the importance of practising safe sex, as, if new antibiotic treatments can't be found, this will be only way of controlling this infection in the future." After genital chlamydia, gonorrhoea is the second most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the UK. According to HPA figures, there were 16,145 new diagnoses of gonorrhoea in 2010, a 3% increase on 2009 when there were 15,606.

BBC News - UK doctors advised gonorrhoea has turned drug resistant

See also:

Ocean trawl reveals 'megavirus'
10 October 2011 - The largest virus yet discovered has been isolated from ocean water pulled up off the coast of Chile.

Called Megavirus chilensis, it is 10 to 20 times wider than the average virus. It just beats the previous record holder, Mimivirus, which was found in a water cooling tower in the UK in 1992. Scientists tell the journal PNAS that Megavirus probably infects amoebas, single-celled organisms that are floating free in the sea. The particle measures about 0.7 micrometres (thousandths of a millimetre) in diameter. "It is bigger than some bacteria," explained Prof Jean-Michel Claverie, from Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France. "You don't need an electron microscope to see it; you can see it with an ordinary light microscope," he told BBC News.

Viruses cannot copy themselves; they need to invade a host cell if they want to replicate. Like Mimivirus, Megavirus has hair-like structures, or fibrils, on the exterior of its shell, or capsid, that probably attract unsuspecting amoebas looking to prey on bacteria displaying similar features. A study of the giant virus's DNA shows it to have more than a thousand genes, the biochemical instructions it uses to build the systems it requires to replicate once inside its host. In the lab experiments conducted by Professor Claverie and colleagues, in which they infected fresh-water amoebas, Megavirus was seen to construct large trojan organelles - the "cells within cells" that would produce new viruses to infect other amoebas.

"Everything is initiated from a single particle, and then grows and grows to become this virion factory," explained Prof Claverie. "That's why it needs all these genes." Megavirus was found off the coast of Las Cruces, central Chile. It was recovered as part of a general trawl in the ocean for biology of interest. "This is a new way of doing virology," said Prof Claverie. "Previously, we only discovered viruses because they caused disease in humans, or animals and plants. But now we are initiating what might be called environmental virology and we are looking for viruses everywhere.

"You just go to lakes, seas and oceans and pick up the water, and then you filter it, and try to rescue the virus by co-cultivating it with some potential host." More generally, there is interest in ocean viruses because they have a major influence on populations of plankton, the microscopic organisms that form the base of many marine food chains. And when they kill plankton, viruses are also helping to regulate the planet's geochemical cycles as the dead organisms sink into the deep, locking away their carbon for aeons. Prof Claverie said the megavirus would not be hazardous to humans.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15242386

 

[MikeK]

This may not have happened so soon (or ever) if there was less over-prescribing of antibiotics and more compliance of patients taking antibiotics.

The number of resistant bacteria strains is growing rapidly.

I am informed that the vast majority of antibiotic resident bugs that are developing are really caused by the enormous amounts of antibiotics we're putting into our cattle, sheep, and pigs.

While I have no medical knowledge that makes sense to me.

 

[yidnar]

An alarming new superbug may be on its way — an incurable form of gonorrhea. The disease, once easily killed with a shot of penicillin, is increasingly becoming drug-resistant. Soon, the world may face a version that can’t be killed by any known antibiotic, warned Catherine Ison, the director of the sexually transmitted bacteria reference library with the United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency.

In recent years, as the disease has evolved, medications once proven to kill the bacteria have become less effective except one, a class of antibiotics called cephalosporins. Now some strains of gonorrhea are showing signs of being resistant to even that, Ison told those at a scientific meeting last week in Edinburgh, Scotland.

*mal left out*

Gonorrhea, is the second most commonly reported infectious disease in the United States. In 2008, there were 336,742 official cases, but this number, the most recent available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, may vastly underestimate the true number.

“We will probably have something like 700,000 cases of gonorrhea this year,” suggested Dr. Edward W. Hook, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and an expert on STD infections.

Not all of those who are infected know it, contributing to the problem. Undiagnosed cases, or infections that are unsuccessfully treated and then linger without obvious symptoms, can create serious health problems. For example, teenage girls between 15 and 19 account for more cases than any other age group. If they aren’t cured, they risk pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility or ectopic pregnancies. People infected with gonorrhea are also about three times more likely to become infected with HIV should they come into contact with the virus


Incurable gonorrhea may be next superbug - Sexploration - msnbc.com


word to parents: i know our little angels are not screwing like rabbits..they would never do that...buy them some condoms....make sure they know to use them....etc...so forth and so on

are you reading this Salt Jones !!!........Shitskin Jones knows why I am laughing !!!

 

[yidnar]

 

[yidnar]

Gonorrhea is now almost exclusively a black disease.

Thank you for that enlightening link from the "council of conservative citizens".

Certainly a well respected medical journal.

Dumb-fuck.

tell me where he his lying !!! ....blacks are going to be infected in even larger numbers when they cant get rid of it !!!

 

[yidnar]

Baaaaa,haaaaa,haaaa,haaaaa!!! where are you Salt Jones ??