Earlier blogs have featured the disquieting propensity of neisseria gonorrhoea to evolve resistance to every known line of treatment (https://blogs.bmj.com/sti/category/gonorrhoea/). Surveillance data indicate the prevalence of the infection in core populations, and the importance of focussing treatment on them ( http://sti.bmj.com/content/85/5/317.abstract?sid=c28b9898-65c9-4548-a10e-9f6ebade86f9); at the same time this is precisely the strategy most likely to disseminate resistance […]
Category: Gonorrhoea
Managing gonorrhoea in a world without antibiotics
On 6th June the World Health Organization (WHO) put out an alert regarding drug-resistant gonorrhoea (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/notes/2012/gonorrhoea_20120606/en/ ) simultaneously with the publication of a Global Action Plan (http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2012/9789241503501_eng.pdf). The last year or so has seen the emergence of strains of the infection that are resistant to cephalosporins, the antibiotics of last resort. The plan includes: increased […]
Emergence of the gonorrhoea “superbug”
Two issues discussed at the recent ISSTDR (International Society Sexually Transmitted Diseases Research) for Conference (11th-14th July) in Montreal, Canada, have made the headlines. First, the emergence in Japan of a new drug resistant “superbug” – an apparently untreatable strain of Gonorrhea (H041). Dr Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria reported […]
So the “clap” has a human side!
Neisseria gonorrhoeae is a nimble bacterium, and past master at adapting itself to resist the challenge of our antibiotics. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at this latest accolade: to have been the first proven case of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) between organisms as disparate as the bacterium and a human being! A recent study […]