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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @03:33PM
No. The real problem in the USA is this: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/oct/15/louise-slaughter/rep-louise-slaughter-says-80-antibiotics-are-fed-l/ [politifact.com]
Most antibiotics are fed to livestock that aren't sick. This creates a _constant_ environment where only resistant bacteria can live. Hospitals are another such place. Whereas if you take a course of antibiotics only once every few years, after those few years the descendants of the resistant bacteria might be rather different (think of how many bacterial generations is a few years) or they might even get outcompeted/displaced by other bacteria and stuff.
But you then eat a hamburger patty that has e-coli because due to typical slaughterhouse practices too much shit gets in the meat. And the e-coli is resistant to antibiotics because the cows get antibiotics all the time.
Or you go to a hospital for some surgery and then while you're there you get the antibiotic resistant strain of MRSA that hangs about in hospitals, because hospitals use antibiotics all the time: http://www.decodedscience.org/hospital-acquired-methicillin-resistant-staphylococcus-aureus-infections-prove-hazardous-to-hospital-inpatients/18273 [decodedscience.org]
See also: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-superbug-sewers-20160307-story.html [latimes.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @04:37PM
Part of not being PC is dealing with reality.
Part of my friends job was going out and notifying people that they had potentially been exposed to XYZ and should see a doctor and get tested. He did this for diseases where treatment is mandatory like TB, and where under our state law you can be compelled to say who you slept with for STDs. He told me about homosexual men and women who would routinely rattle off a list of 30+ names of recent partners but most of them unreachable because they only had a first name and prostitutes who had the same issue. Almost every new STD variant first showed up in the gay community, then blacks, hookers, and finally the general population. That pattern likely holds true today. Some were particularly nasty variants that caused cancers that were almost entirely unique to the gay community for almost a decade. This issue was a problem even in the 1990's due not only to non-compliance, but a lack of regular testing, exceedingly high levels of promiscuity and these organisms evolving. Eventually the health department began running PCR samples more routinely as it became cheaper to do so and often found people with 3-4 variants of the same STD. Even the threat of AIDS did not get most people to substantially modify behavior, and notifications there were even less fun. He even told me about "positive" clubs where people would literally come to be infected (if it sounds insane it is, but ...). Nothing that has been tried has really made a dent in human behavior. He worked for the department of health during the 1990' and into the early 2000's before going to work for the veterans administration.
If you want to target human compliance for STDs those are your target groups. I wish you luck and I hope you have some better ideas than what has been tried. Even criminalizing certain behaviors has not made a dent nor is it likely to as prosecution is rare even in AIDS cases. I don't think any of this changes without a very large budget PR campaign to attempt to modify behaviors, and in the current political environment that is simply not going to happen.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday August 31 2016, @05:22PM
Statistically speaking, gay women have LOWER rates of almost every STD out there; I think the only exception was some form of mild chlamydia, and I will bet my shiny gold star THAT one was introduced by some bisexual woman who caught it off a man.
The risk factor seems to be lack of forethought and self-control, and men seem to have more of a problem with this than women do for whatever reason. That old joke about the U-Haul on the second date has some truth to it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @10:29PM
The risk factor seems to be lack of forethought and self-control, and men seem to have more of a problem with this than women do for whatever reason.
Have a reference for that? What are the usage rates of barrier contraceptives for gay women verses gay men?
Transmission of STDs are highly dependent on the type of sexual activity.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday September 01 2016, @07:15AM
Number of partners is the major risk factor, from the sound of it.
In case you're not familiar with it, the U-Haul joke is:
Q - what does a lesbian do on the second date?
A - she drives up in a moving van with all her stuff!
This is tongue in cheek (or something else...sorry, not sorry), but unintentionally very revealing, as is the follow up "Q - Okay, then what does a gay guy do on the second date? A - *What* second date?" Obviously you can't generalize to millions of people, especially not through humor, topical as it may be. But it's not for nothing that these have been stereotypes since before I was born.
Unpacking it, what this means is gay women tend to bond *hard;* the worst you can (could?) say about most of us is we're serial monogamists. I've only had one sexual partner, of three relationships total (one ongoing), and I don't--can't!--do casual sex. As you may expect, regular STD screenings turn up clean. It's not lesbians you hear about when people mention the Castro district. Whatever the reason, men seem a lot more motivated to have sex with a lot of partners. Maybe something evolutionary?
It follows, then, that if having a lot of partners is likely to get you infected, all else being equal, the group with the most partners per person will have the most STDs. And all else is NOT equal: fingering is a lot less likely to get you something nasty than anal sex for example.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 31 2016, @06:09PM
Another quite convincing argument to vote for Clinton, right here on Soylent news!