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The World Health Organization (WHO) is recommending the use of cephalosporins to treat gonorrhea rather than quinolones, due to emergence of quinolone-resistant strains. However, some strains of gonorrhea are already resistant to drugs in the newly recommended class of antibiotics:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned back in 2012 that one of two drugs in the class of antibiotics the WHO now recommends, cephalosporins, was in danger of becoming useless to treat gonorrhea, at least in the U.S, and recommended that doctors stop prescribing it. Since then, the CDC's recommended treatment for gonorrhea has been a dual therapy, with the two antibiotics ceftriaxone and azithromycin, but an analysis in July warned that the bacteria could even become resistant to that combination.
As for when antibiotic options will run out altogether, Teodora Wi of the WHO's Department of Reproductive Health and Research tells the journal Science, "We will have to have new drugs in 5 years, I think." The U.S. government is spending millions of dollars through the CDC and National Institutes of Health to develop new antibiotics and combat resistance.
The WHO also revised its guidelines for treating two other sexually transmitted infections, chlamydia and syphilis. Neither is facing severe antibiotic resistance. Syphilis, for example, can be treated with a single dose of penicillin, although there is a worldwide shortage of the drug.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday August 31 2016, @02:02PM
Phages will work for anything in perpetuity. When the bacteria evolve, the phages evolve. The problems are things like certain strains ecoli that are fatal in tiny concentrations. And that's not something that they need to do to survive.
Each time they use phages they take a sample and use an appropriate page. They're not using them on large segments of the population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @02:10PM