Seeing as how April is STD Awareness Month, now might be an appropriate time to hit you with some terrifying awareness. Are you sitting down? Because researchers say that gonorrhea is increasingly developing resistance to all of the antibiotics we have to treat it. Does that mean it's becoming a (gulp) SUPERBUG? "This may be the harbinger of things to come. The resistance may be getting worse," said Dr. Kimberly Workowski, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Division of STD Prevention. As if we needed yet another reason not to jump in the Gowanus Canal anytime soon.
Analyzing the most recent data from 2010 indicates that gonorrhea has begun to develop resistance to cephalosporin, the only class of antibiotic left that doctors recommend to treat the disease. If that happens, researchers say it could indeed develop into a superbug, like MRSA, and have a "catastrophic effect" on our ability to control the disease in the country. And treating it with traditional antibiotics, including penicillin and tetracycline, isn't advised, because resistance can redevelop quickly: "The concern is that history tends to repeat itself. It's following the same pattern that's happened before," Workowski said.
Recently, the Bronx was found to have an extremely high and disturbing STD rate: it is approximately 1300 percent greater than national average—they had 1,145 STDs per 100,000 people in the Bronx vs. a national average of 83. To be fair, they were only 250 percent greater than the NY state average. More than 301,174 cases of gonorrhea were reported to the CDC in 2009, though the agency estimates more than 700,000 people become infected with the disease each year in the U.S.
Researchers are responding in two ways: the CDC is working to identify other drugs that might be used to treat gonorrhea cost-effectively...and they're also just-in-case working to develop a response plan if there is an outbreak. Comforting thoughts, but Skynet will have killed us all by then, right?
