BRITAIN: Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea

The British government is telling doctors that the usual course of treatment for gonorrhea is now largely useless.

The Health Protection Agency says we may be heading to a point when the disease is incurable unless new treatments can be found. For now, doctors must stop using the usual treatment cefixime and instead use two more powerful antibiotics. One is a pill and the other a jab. The HPA say the change is necessary because of increasing resistance. [snip] As recently as 2005, no gonorrhoea bacteria with reduced susceptibility to cefixime could be found in the UK. The bacterium that causes the infection - Neisseria gonorrhoeae - has an unusual ability to adapt itself and has gained resistance, or reduced susceptibility, to a growing list of antibiotics - first penicillin itself, then tetracyclines, ciprofloxacin and now cefixime.