to strangers A press release from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health two weeks ago seemed fairly routine. The wording may have been a little unsettling, but it was carefully worded. Analysts found a resident with gonorrhea who showed a “decreased response to multiple antibiotics,” but that person, and a second resident with a similar infection, were cured.
For civilians, the announcement may have felt like a boat hitting a small wave. For those involved in public health and medicine, titanic and found an iceberg.
Here’s what the news actually said: A disease so old and so basic that we hardly think of it, despite affecting about 700,000 Americans a year, has now overcome the last antibiotic available to treat it. If the ability to circumvent those drugs is given to us, our only options are to desperately seek out other drugs that are not yet approved, or untreated gonorrhea causes arthritis, and we are born with It is to go back to the days when babies were blinded and men were sterilized. Women with testicle damage and pelvic inflammatory disease.
The sickening thing for the experts is that they saw an iceberg coming. Gonorrhea is unlike Covid, a new pathogen that has surprised us and called for heroic research efforts and medical care. It has a predictable response and an equally predictable record of developing antibiotic resistance.
Nevertheless, it is ahead of us. The findings in Massachusetts are “disturbing,” said Yonatan Grad, an infectious disease physician, researcher and associate professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. “This is an affirmation of a trend we’ve known, and the expectation is that it will get worse.”
A little more detail on the announcement: The Massachusetts department said the person had been diagnosed with a new strain of gonorrhea with a set of features never before detected in a single bacterial sample in the United States. included genomic features previously seen in patients from the UK, Asia, and one patient from Nevada. A60 pen allele. However, genomic analysis showed for the first time that he exhibited complete resistance to three antibiotics, and that he also exhibited some degree of resistance to three antibiotics. One of them is a drug of last resort in the United States. It is an injectable cephalosporin antibiotic called ceftriaxone.
In 2020, the CDC declared that doctors should only administer ceftriaxone for gonorrhea because all other antibiotics historically used against infections have lost their effectiveness. . Fortunately, the substantial doses recommended by the CDC worked for this patient as well. A second patient was also cured. This patient was unrelated to the first patient and had the same strain with the same resistance pattern. But to experts, the reduced susceptibility indicates that ceftriaxone may also be fading away.
“This situation is both a warning and an opportunity,” said Kathleen Roosevelt, director of STD prevention and HIV surveillance in Massachusetts, as gonorrhea rates reach historic highs across the nation. emphasize that To curb that trend, her agency will direct all frontline medical professionals in the state to interview patients who test positive extensively to ensure that those who receive treatment are cured. recommended to come back for And, crucially, changing the way clinics test patients for infections.
