Atlanta – U.S. health officials are recommending wider use of a new drug to treat gonorrhea because the sexually transmitted disease is steadily becoming resistant to the longtime standard antibiotic.
Fluoroquinolones, a class of antibiotics that includes Cipro, have been the most common way to treat the bacterial disease since the early 1990s. Since then, gonorrhea has grown increasingly resistant to those drugs.
On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that a different class of antibiotics, cephalosporins, be used instead.
“Gonorrhea has now joined the list of other superbugs for which treatment options have become dangerously few,” said Dr. Henry Masur, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America. “To make a bad problem even worse, we’re also seeing a decline in the development of new antibiotics to treat these infections.”
The CDC made the new recommendation after discovering that nearly 7 percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in a survey of 26 U.S. cities last year had drug-resistant strains of the disease. In 2001, only about 0.6 percent of gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men were drug-resistant.
“That leaves us with a single class of highly effective antibiotics,” said Dr. John Douglas Jr., director of the CDC’s division of STD prevention. Other experts called the situation perilous.
It’s the first time cephalosporins have been recommended to treat gonorrhea for the entire U.S. population, although the CDC recommended the antibiotics to treat against drug-resistant gonorrhea in California and Hawaii in 2002. Two years later, the CDC made the same recommendation to treat the bacterial infection among American men who have sex with men.
The CDC estimates that more than 700,000 people in the U.S. acquire gonorrhea each year through sexual contact.
