think on this.

jakke:

It is time to sound the alarm. During the past 3 years, the wily gonococcus has become less susceptible to our last line of antimicrobial defense, threatening our ability to cure gonorrhea and prevent severe sequelae.

Oh goodness this is not good.

Gonorrhea is a really common sexually transmitted infection, and over the decades it’s kept evolving to have resistance to various different classes of antibiotics. Once 5% of new cases are resistant to the currently-recommended antibiotic, everyone switches to using a new antibiotic - because you really want to make sure you’re killing off the new resistant strain.

And now there’s a strain that is increasingly resistant to the third-generation cephalosporin antibiotics that are currently recommended. It’s especially prevalent among men who have sex with men, who are getting pretty close to that 5% resistance threshhold as a subgroup. It’s not clear what kind of treatment will be feasible once this kind of resistance is widespread and once the strains that are resistant are more fit in other regards.

Anyway, the doctors writing this article don’t really have much recommendation beyond making sure that all cases of gonorrhea are treated as effectively as possible. If this becomes more widespread, it’s obviously going to become a serious problem, because untreated gonorrhea has all kinds of downsides. This is entirely suboptimal.

So yeah, remember to wrap it up. And if you get gonorrhea, take the antibiotics all the way to the end of the prescription, because stopping halfway through gives you the best chance of having something antibiotic-resistant evolve.