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New Gonorrhea Strain: Antibiotic Resistant

Posted: 12 Jul 2011 09:30 PM PDT

A new strain of gonorrhea is discovered by scientist and they have found that this strain is resistant to all available antibiotics. The details of the discovery made byDr. Magnus Unemo, Dr. Makoto Ohnishi, and colleagues will be presented at the 19th conference of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research (ISSTDR) which runs July 10-13 in Quebec City, Canada.

The research team identified an unknown variant of the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae.

"This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery," noted Dr. Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria. "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."

"While it is still too early to assess if this new strain has become widespread, the history of newly emergent resistance in the bacterium suggests that it may spread rapidly unless new drugs and effective treatment programs are developed," Dr. Unemo continued.

Gonorrhea is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of cases in the U.S. alone is estimated at 700,000 annually.