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.
