Incurable gonorrhea may be next superbug

strollingbones

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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
 
wow

just wow

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
 
Like all mothers Momma Nature can not make up her mind.

Do you want your son to be your celibate little boy free from the wrath of your disease or do you want grandchildren and lots of them?

Make up your mind Momma!
 
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One night in Bangkok could land ya inna hospital with a nasty disease...
:eek:
New Study Warns of Widespread 'Superbugs' in South Asia
April 07, 2011 - Indian health officials have rejected a new medical study warning of widespread drug-resistant bacteria in the country's capital. But the co-author of the study says Delhi is in denial, and warns the bacteria can spread easily around the world, possibly threatening the effectiveness of medical treatments.
India's Health Ministry has issued a statement dismissing new British research warning of a dramatic spread of a bacteria containing a drug-resistant gene in the nation's capital. The report was published Thursday in the British journal Lancet Infectious Diseases. It focuses on the gene "NDM-1," in which ND stands for New Delhi. A report last year cited the gene's presence here in bacteria found in hospital environments. The newer report says the bacteria is now widespread in the city's drinking supply, sewer systems, and other public sources of water. What concerns Dr. Mark Toleman, a co-author of the British study, is that NDM-1 turns ordinary illness-causing bacteria into what are known as "superbugs," which are all but impervious to antibiotics. "For these particular type of bacteria, there are no useful antibiotics left," he said.

That means simple bacterial illnesses, like dysentery, could become nearly impossible to treat with drugs. Advanced procedures like surgery, which rely on antibiotics to control infection, could become much more dangerous. The Indian Health Ministry statement, issued Thursday evening, describes the Lancet findings as "not significant." The statement criticizes the study as being unsupported by clinical evidence, and points out that Indian patients respond well to antibiotic treatment. Dr. Ranjit Roy Chaudhary is a senior advisor on medical policy to the Indian government. He says the Lancet study should not be cause for alarm. "The science of the study is good. But the implication of the findings is always made a little more sensational than it is," Chaudhary said.

Chaudhary says India has long been aware it faces water management challenges. "This is not the first time bugs have been found in the water - even resistant bugs. We shouldn't get alarmed by this. We should take the ordinary precautions. Boiling water for 20 minutes will get rid of it," Chaudhary said. Still, Toleman insists India is in "extreme denial" about the potential danger of NDM-1. He says that its spread is probably not limited to New Delhi. "Almost certainly it's much more widespread. And I'm sure if we did a study in most, or maybe even all, of the major cities in India, we'd find it," he said. Toleman and co-author Professor Timothy Walsh expect many more studies pointing to South Asia as a key culprit in spreading antibiotic-resistant bacteria globally via tourism and travel.

"The polluted water supply and the poor sanitation in India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan is not only dramatically affecting the health of those individual nations, but ... this is having an effect on the health of the rest of the world," Toleman said. The controversy over the Lancet report coincides with Thursday's World Health Day, sponsored by the United Nations World Health Organization, devoted this year entirely to the theme of antibiotic resistance. Researchers widely agree that improper use of antibiotics, which is rampant in India, is making it easier for drug-resistant genes to emerge. The Indian government is expected to announce new policies to restrict access to antibiotics in a matter of days.

Source
 
As a young Corpsman in the West Pac in the early 1980s, I battled a strain of bacteria known as Penicillinase Producing Neisseria Gonorrhoeae (PPNG). As the name implies, the infection made Penicillin and was thus resistant to it as a treatment. One advantage for the Sailor and Marine (and others) who caught PPNG, or the clap, was we treated it with only one shot of Trobicin instead of the two thick cold shots of Procaine Penicillin.
 
New 'superbug' found in milk...
:eek:
New 'superbug' found in Danish and UK milk
June 03, 2011 - AN entirely new strain of the drug-resistant MRSA superbug has been found in cow's milk and people in Britain and Denmark, a study published today said.
The previously unseen variant "potentially poses a public health problem," said lead researcher Mark Holmes, senior lecturer in preventive veterinary medicine at Britain's Cambridge University. There was no general threat to the safety of pasteurised milk and dairy products, but people working with animals could be at risk, said the study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. Dubbed a "flesh-eating" bacteria in media reports, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has emerged as a major threat in hospitals around the world, becoming potentially deadly when it infects wounds. "Although there is circumstantial evidence that dairy cows are providing a reservoir of infection, it is still not known for certain if cows are infecting people, or people are infecting cows. This is one of the many things we will be looking into next," Mark Holmes told a news conference today.

"Drinking milk or eating meat is not a health issue, as long as the milk is pasteurised," he said, adding that the process of making cheese also "generally kills most of the bacteria". Mark Holmes said the main worry was that the new strain would be wrongly identified by traditional genetic screening tests as being drug-susceptible, meaning people could therefore be given the wrong antibiotics. Colleague Laura Garcia-Alvarez, also from Cambridge University, said it was "certainly worrying" to find the new strain in both cows and humans but said the pasteurisation of milk would keep it out of the food chain. "Workers on dairy farms may be at higher risk of carrying MRSA, but we do not yet know if this translates into a higher risk of infection," Laura Garcia-Alvarez added. The team stumbled on the new MRSA bug while investigating mastitis, a serious disease which affects dairy cows.

They found MRSA bacteria with the same mutated gene in 13 of 940 samples from 450 dairy herds in south-west England. Tests on people treated for MRSA revealed the same new strain in 12 instances in Scotland, 15 from England and 24 from Denmark. The scientists also spotted a "clustering" of human and cow samples containing exactly the same new strain, suggesting transmission between cattle and humans. Separately another study released today showed another new form of MRSA in hospitals in Ireland that is closely related to the previously unseen one found in Britain.

Like the British one, it is not detected by current genetic tests and is also found in cows, said the research published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. "The results of our study and the independent United Kingdom study indicate that new types of MRSA that can colonise and infect humans are currently emerging from animal reservoirs in Ireland and Europe and it is difficult to correctly identify them as MRSA," said David Coleman of Dublin University. "This knowledge will enable us to rapidly adapt existing genetic MRSA detection tests, but has also provided invaluable insights into the evolution and origins of MRSA," he added. The announcement of the new types of MRSA comes a day after the World Health Organisation said a lethal E.coli bacteria that has killed 18 people in Europe is "extremely rare" and had never been seen in an outbreak form before.

Source
 
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.

At the same time, unlike other bacteria which doesn't have to be treated, N. gonorrhea needs to be addressed. It's just a fact of life that bacteria will become resistant. As noted, it used to be susceptible to penicillin, now strains that are resistant to ceftriaxone/rocephin are emerging.

Since, unlike Staph aureus, N. Gonorrhea is an STD that doesn't incubate in hospital surfaces, I don't think the blame for the fact that we are engaged in endless biological warfare with bacteria can be laid at the hand of treating a nasty STD.
 
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Racial minorities continue to face severe disparities across all three reportable STDs. While racial disparities persist overall, African-Americans, especially young African-American women, are the most heavily affected. Young African-American women face significantly higher rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea than any other group, while the highest rates of syphilis are among African-American men.

STD Surveillance, 2008 - Trends
 
Similar to Tuskegee study...
:(
Guatemalans 'died' in 1940s US syphilis study
29 August 2011 - Hundreds of people were infected with syphilis bacteria during the experiments
At least 83 Guatemalans are thought to have died not long after being deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhoea in the 1940s, a presidential commission in Washington has heard. US government scientists infected hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers to study the effects of penicillin. None of those infected consented. The head of the commission, Amy Gutmann, called the research a "shameful piece of medical history".

The Presidential Commission for the study of Bioethical Issues said some 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in all the research that took place between 1946 and 1948. Of these, some 1,300 were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhoea or another sexually transmitted disease, chancroid. And of that group only approximately 700 received some sort of treatment. According to documents the commission had studied, at least 83 of the 5,500 subjects had died by the end of 1953.

'Grievously wrong'

The body was unable to say how many - if any - of those deaths were caused directly or indirectly by the deliberate infections. But Dr Gutmann lambasted those responsible for the research. "Those involved in the study failed to show a minimal respect for human rights and morality in the conduct of research," she declared, in her concluding remarks to the panel. Many of the actions were "grievously wrong", she added, and those individuals behind the study were "morally culpable to various degrees". "Civilisations can be judged by the way they treat their most vulnerable," Dr Gutmann said, before stressing that "we failed to keep that covenant".

President Obama set up the commission when the research first came to light last year. He also apologised to his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, saying the acts ran contrary to American values. Earlier this year, a group of Guatemalans who were infected and their relatives announced that they were suing the US government over the affair.The commission is due to publish its first report, to establish the historical facts, next month. Its final report, in December, will examine the ethical issues involved, and aims to "make sure this never happens again".

BBC News - Guatemalans 'died' in 1940s US syphilis study
 
Apparently they found a sex trade worker in Japan with an incurable strain.

Yikes! I can't even dream of how this could explode. WHO is getting involved. Why aren't people using protection?

It's like russian roulette to not protect oneself these days. Let alone go to a hooker and not protect yourself.

That's just crazy. I don't get it.
 
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