In the past, whilst some STIs are more serious than others, most were curable. Now, the last antibiotic which has proved effective for gonorrhea has started failing to work. Researchers have released information that during a study, the oral antibiotic failed to cure seven percent of all patients treated for gonorrhea at a specific clinic.
Worryingly, this seems to show a treatment-resistant strain of gonorrhea that is emerging. This has raised alarm amongst doctors in the U.S. They have now been ordered by health officials to stop prescribing an antibiotic called cefixime as the recent lab cultures have shown that gonorrhea is starting to develop a resistance to the treatment.
This has left U.S. doctors with only one single treatment option for cases of gonorrhea, and that is to inject an antibiotic called ceftriaxone to fight the disease.
Some doctors feel that it is only a matter of time until full antibiotic resistance occurs in cases of gonorrhea, and the disease becomes untreatable using antibiotics. There is no other known treatment for gonorrhea to date.
At the moment, even when the disease does not resist the antibiotic, it has been shown that increasing levels of the antibiotic are needed in order to fight the disease. The study into this looked at those who attended the clinic suffering from the disease, and then identified return rate of those who were still suffering from the disease.