SCIENTISTS HAVE discovered a strain of a common sexually transmitted disease that has become resistant to antibiotics.
It could turn this once readily treated infection into a global threat to public health, a conference in Canada has heard.
A team from Sweden made the dramatic announcement at the 19th conference of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research in Quebec city.
It is a highly antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhoea ( Neisseria gonorrhoeae) named H041 and was an alarming and a predictable discovery, said Dr Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria. Dr Unemo and colleagues made the discovery.
Gonorrhoea had a remarkable capacity to develop resistance to all drugs introduced to control it, he said. It was too early to predict whether this new H041 strain would become widespread. However, past experience indicated that it could spread rapidly without new drugs and treatment programmes.
Gonorrhoea is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections globally, with 700,000 new cases detected in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US.
Here it represented just over 8 per cent of the 2,117 infections reported during the first quarter of 2011, according to the Irish Health Protection Surveillance Centre.
Untreated, it could lead to serious and irreversible health complications in men and women, a spokesman at the centre said.
“Reports of any bacterial infection developing resistance to antibiotics is always of concern,” the spokesman said yesterday.
Drug companies had been slower to conduct research into new antibiotics in recent years, according to Dr Shirley McQuade, medical director of the Well Woman Centre in Dublin.
“We have fewer effective antibiotics than we would have had a few years ago,” she said. “Gonorrhoea is one of the organisms that has developed resistance over the years.”
The Well Woman Centre carries out a combined chlamydia and gonorrhoea test which was highly accurate, she said. “In the people we are testing in Dublin at this time, gonorrhoea is a very low risk.” However, the fact that a strain had become completely resistant was alarming, she said.
“It is just a warning to us that wholesale use of broad spectrum antibiotics is not the way to deal with infections,” she added.
For further information on sexual health, visit the Health Service Executive website: yoursexualhealth.ie