The weekend started with a particularly awful few words trending on social media: super gonorrhea. This is because the World Health Organization recently warned that the pandemic is helping fuel the rise of antibiotics.resistant bacteria, including the bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Unfortunately, the situation is just probably to get worse.
Antibiotic resistance has been a slowly growing crisis for decades, but the consequences eventually become difficult to ignore. It is currently estimated that so-called superbugs kill about 35,000 people Americans annually, as well as 700,000 people worldwide.
One of the more worrying excellent threats today is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the namesake bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Gonorrhea is usually not fatal and often has no symptoms, bif left untreated, it can lead to complications such as arthritis, joint pain and rash, as well as infertility and chronic pelvic pain. The bacteria can also be transmitted during childbirth from a mother to her baby, causing an infection that can be fatal or cause serious problems such as blindness. Remarkable symptoms include a green or yellow discharge from the genitals and pain during urination.
These bacteria are scary because they are so becoming impenetrable after the firstline antibiotics used to treat it. In 2018, British doctors report to find a man with the first known case of gonorrhea who was very resistant to the combination therapy used in most countries as standard treatment: the antibiotics ceftriaxone and azithromycin. Although the man’s gonorrhea could be treated with another antibiotic, experts confirmed the worst fears. Other cases of super gonorrhea, as well as other highly resistant sexually transmitted infections, has since been documented.
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During this year, experts from the World Health Organization and elsewhere sounding the alarm about antibiotic resistance is getting worse due to the pandemic. First, doctors regularly prescribed antibiotics to patients with covid-19 admitted to the hospital, a disease caused by a virus (antibiotics usually do not work against viruses). This is apparently done because patients in the hospital can cause secondary infections caused by bacteria. Early research also suggested that the antibiotic azithromycin may have an additional antiviral effect, possibly in combination with other drugs such as hydroxychloroquine.
Since then, however, studies have done found that azithromycin, alone or in combination with hydroxychloroquine, has not yet been life-saving impact on covid-19 patients. Other research has found that doctors usually prescribe antibiotics to patients without any evidence that they have bacterial infections.
This brings us to last week, when the British outlet The Sun reported on the WHO warning about gonorrhea. In addition to the above issues, the WHO also noted that the pandemic is likely to delay the cause of STI tests and medical care, increasing the risk that people will never find out about their gonorrhea, or even try self-medication improperly.. The abuse and overuse of antibiotics, especially azithromycin, only adds more dynamite to the powder keg which is super gonorrhea.
“Such a situation could fuel the rise of resistance in gonorrhea,” a WTO spokesman said. tell The sun.
What is worse is that the number of gonorrhea and other STIs has increased in many places recently. The US, for example, has a record number of STIs reported in 2018, with cases of gonorrhea climbing for the fifth consecutive year. It is possible (even probably) that the pandemic this year has dampened many people’s sexual activity. But antibiotics-resistant bacteria did not disappear, and cases of supergonorrhea and other highly resistant infections will undoubtedly continue to increase in the coming years.
There is still hope that enough newer antibiotics and other therapies can be developed in time to prevent the worstcase scenario, where common bacterial infections become just as dangerous as a century ago. Scientists are also working on it vaccines for diseases such as gonorrhea. But there is no a clear solution on the horizon, and the clock is running low. In 2014, a report commissioned by the British government estimated that, if nothing is done, annual global deaths due to antibiotics-resistant infections would obscure cancer deaths by 2050, with about 10 million deaths per year. Then super gonorrhea will be the least of our worries.