By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Scientists in Japan have identified a new “superbug” strain of gonorrhea that is resistant to all known antibiotics and could initiate a new era of untreatable gonorrhea.
Reuters is reporting that the new strain was identified first in Japan, a country where other treatment-resistant strains of gonorrhea tend to emerge. Analysis of the new strain found it to be extremely resistant to all cephalosporin-class antibiotics – which are the last remaining drugs still effective in treating gonorrhea.
Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, who discovered the strain with colleagues from Japan in samples from Kyoto, described it as both “alarming” and “predictable.”
“Japan has historically been the place for the first emergence and subsequent global spread of different types of resistance in gonorrhea,” he told Reuters in a phone interview.
“Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it,” he said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), gonorrhea is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world. It currently infects about 700,000 people a year in the U.S. A bacterial infection, it can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility in women if left untreated. Men with the disease can suffer painful scarring of the urethra, urination problems and kidney failure. For both sexes, long-term complications include joint pain, heart valve infections and meningitis.
Although no cases of the superbug have yet to turn up here, the CDC confirms that the bacteria has once again being showing signs of resistance to the drugs used to treat it. Doctors first began treating gonorrhea with antibiotics in the 1940s but within 30 years, it had become resistant to penicillin and tetracycline. Doctors then tried a class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones to treat it, but by 2007, those weren’t working either. That left only cephalosporin drugs available to treat gonorrhea, but now the disease is showing signs that it is able to resist these too.
“The measurements we’re finding in the laboratory do show concerning trends of declining susceptibility to cephalosporin antibiotics,’’ said Dr. Robert D. Kirkcaldy, medical epidemiologist at the CDC, to The New York Times. “What we’ve been noticing is really since 2009 and 2010, it’s taking higher concentrations of antibiotic to kill the bacteria. This could mean resistance to the last antibiotic we have for gonorrhea could be on the horizon.’’
This is why British scientists warned the global medical community last year that gonorrhea is on its way to becoming a superbug – a bacteria that has mutated and become resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics – after increasing reports of gonorrhea drug resistance emerged in Hong Kong, China, Australia and other parts of Asia.
Unemo is warning that prior experience with gonorrhea resistance suggests that this new multi-drug resistant strain could spread around the world within decades.
“Based on the historical data … resistance has emerged and spread internationally within 10 to 20 years,” he said.
Gonorrhea is just one of many sexually transmitted diseases. According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 340 million new cases of these diseases occur every year among people aged 15 to 49.
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