The Briefing Room
General Category => Health/Education => Topic started by: 240B on July 12, 2017, 01:06:24 pm
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Live Science
By Agata Blaszczak-Boxe
July 7, 2017 06:56pm ET
The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea is becoming increasingly more difficult, or at times even impossible, to treat because strains of the bacteria that cause it have become resistant to antibiotics, according to a new report.
In the report, researchers looked at data from gonorrhea cases and antibiotic resistance from 77 countries. Of all countries that reported such data between 2009 and 2014, 97 percent reported cases of the disease that were resistant to the gonorrhea treatment ciprofloxacin, 81 percent reported cases that were resistant to another treatment called azithromycin, and 66 percent reported cases that were resistant to the treatment called cephalosporin, the researchers found.
"The bacteria that cause gonorrhea are particularly smart," Dr. Teodora Wi, medical officer of human reproduction at the World Health Organization (WHO), who co-authored the report, said in a statement. "Every time we use a new class of antibiotics to treat the infection, the bacteria evolve to resist them." [27 Devastating Infectious Diseases]
(more)
https://www.livescience.com/59731-gonorrhea-resistance-to-drugs-worldwide.html