Gonorrhea Joins List Of Increasingly Antibiotic-Resistant Infections
Public Health England released a report which found that gonorrhea was building resistance to traditional antibiotic treatment, The Pharmaceutical Journal reports.
The Gonococcal Resistance to Antimicrobials Surveillance Program (GRASP), a study published annually since 2000, comprises data collected from genitourinary medicine clinics in England and Wales. According to the report, there were nearly thirty thousand cases of gonorrhea diagnosed in England and Wales in 2013, a 15 percent increase from the previous year.
Guideline-recommended treatment for gonorrhea is a dual regimen of ceftriaxone and azithromycin, with 86.5 percent of patients receiving that prescription. According to the GRASP report, both antibiotics are used simultaneously in an effort to circumvent risk of antimicrobial resistance.
The 2013 findings showed increased rates of resistance to both drugs. Other alternative drugs such as cefixime, ciprofloxacin, and penicillin, also encountered resistance.
According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), combatting resistant infections puts an enormous financial strain on the U.S. healthcare system — between $21 billion and $34 billion annually. The CDC estimates that two million people per year are infected with antibiotic-resistant infections, which result in 23,000 deaths.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a report in 2013 which outlined measures for preventing antibiotic resistance. These strategies include: ramping up efforts to prevent infection from occurring and/or spreading, tracking the disease and analyzing risk factors for resistant strains, improving antibiotic stewardship, and aggressively developing new drugs to combat the disease.
Gwenda Hughes, head of sexually transmitted infections at Public Health England, explained: “We are dealing with a bacterium that is adept at mutating to develop new resistance, so we cannot afford to be complacent. Drug resistance is a very real threat to the treatment of bacterial infections, and we must be alert to any new and emerging resistance trends observed through our program.”