More than 700,000 people in the United States probably get gonorrhea each year. I say "probably" because the Centers for Disease Control doesn't know for sure. It's an estimate, because a lot of those cases go untested, unreported, and untreated.
The good news is that, since the 1940s, getting people to get themselves tested has been the hard part. Once you know the gonorrhea is there, antibiotics have made it both easy and cheap to treat. The (more) bad news: That's changing.
At her Superbug blog, Maryn McKenna talks about the threat of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea—it's not just an issue of health, it's also an issue of how much health costs. So far, there's not been gonorrhea reported that's immune to all the drugs we can throw at it. Just the inexpensive drugs. Anticipating big problems when treating gonorrhea becomes a pricy proposition, the World Health Organization has put together a plan for improving treatment today.
The plan specifically calls out an aspect of the growing resistance problem that we highlighted at SciAm: Community control now depends on rapid molecular tests that identify the gonorrhea organism (Neisseria gonorrhaea) but cannot distinguish between drug-susceptible and antibiotic-resistant organisms. Hence, patients who were treated, and then went back to their doctors with the same symptoms, were assumed to have been cured and then reinfected. Physicians have not had the tools to identify ongoing infections that never responded to treatment — and patients who had those resistant, not-responding infections then went on to unknowingly infect others.
In order to address that problem, the plan calls specifically for improvements in lab capacity, diagnosis and surveillance, as well as asking for things that apply to the greater problem of antibiotic resistance: improved awareness, bigger efforts at prescribing antibiotics appropriately and better drugs. One thing that it particularly calls for — as the CDC did in the New England Journal last February — is for physicians to start applying a “test of cure,” actually checking microbiologically to see whether a patient who was prescribed an antibiotic for gonorrhea is clear of infection, or harboring a resistant strain.
Of course, that's expensive, too. The cheapest option is still to not get gonorrhea at all. Get tested. Make sure your partners are tested. And use protection. In the future, we're not going to be able to afford treating some STDs as "no big deal".
Read more about the WHO plan and antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea at the Superbug blog
