Gonorrhoea becoming drug resistant

11th October 2011 - Doctors in the UK are changing the recommended treatment for gonorrhoea, because it has become resistant to a common antibiotic.

Gonorrhoea is the second most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the UK after chlamydia, and until now, the oral antibiotic cefixime has usually been used to treat it.

Gonorrhoea's history of beating drugs

Gonorrhoea has been fairly easy to treat over the last 70 years since penicillin was introduced. However, the organism that causes the infection, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, has the ability to adapt and build up resistance to treatment. The first antibiotic it managed to beat was penicillin itself, and there have been several others since.

The Health Protection Agency says laboratory tests show that failure of gonorrhoea treatment has grown from 10.6% in 2005 to 17.4% in 2010.

In 2005, there were no known cefixime-resistant gonorrhoea bacteria in the UK.

New gonorrhoea treatment

Sexual health doctors are now being recommended to prescribe a combination of two drugs as first choice treatment:

• ceftriaxone, which is a more powerful antibiotic than cefixime and is given by injection
• azithromycin, given by mouth

In a statement, Cathy Ison, Health Protection Agency Professor and gonorrhoea expert says: "Our lab tests have shown a dramatic reduction in the sensitivity of the drug we were using as the main treatment for gonorrhoea. This presents the very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in the future."

However, she warns this latest move to combination therapy won't solve the problem forever: "History tells us that resistance to this therapy will develop too. In the absence of any new alternative treatments for when this happens, we will face a situation where gonorrhoea cannot be cured.

"This highlights the importance of practising safe sex, as, if new antibiotic treatments can’t be found, this will be the only way of controlling this infection in the future."

Patients who refuse an injection will be offered oral antibiotics instead.