#HealthNews : Gonorrhea is nearly impossible to treat, but a new drug offers hope

It may soon be impossible to treat gonorrhea, according to the World Health Organization, as two-thirds of the world's countries have reported gonorrhea cases that resist all known antibiotics.

If that happens, doctors warn, more people will be left with an incurable infection that, while not life-threatening, can cause significant health problems. What's more, it could mark the beginning of the post-antibiotic era of medicine.

But a new drug that specifically targets antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is giving researchers hope. Recent trials have shown that this drug is 96 percent effective at killing gonorrhea.

The infection is widespread and intractable. In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that gonorrhea was the second most common sexually transmitted disease in the U.S., with 555,608 reported cases. An estimated 78 million people are infected with the bacteria worldwide, according to the WHO, and this number may be much higher because underreporting remains a problem

A dependable treatment is urgently needed.

"Since there is no vaccine to prevent gonorrhea, and the possibility of untreatable gonorrhea is looming larger, it is imperative that we develop new drugs to treat it," said Dr. Stephanie Taylor, professor of medicine and microbiology at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine.

With the world using the last viable batch of antibiotics to treat gonorrhea, the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership, a drug resistance initiative, has partnered with Entasis Therapeutics, a U.S. biotech company, to speed up the development of the new drug, zoliflodacin.

In November, the last phase of the single-dose antibiotic trials took place, involving 650 people in Thailand, South Africa, the U.S. and Europe. Researchers hope that the drug will be available to the public by 2023 — the first new drug to treat drug-resistant gonorrhea in over two decades.

So why has it taken so long for scientists to come up with a new treatment?

"The bacterium has steadily evolved to be less susceptible to the antibiotics used for treatment," said Dr. Edward W. Hook III, an expert on sexually transmitted diseases and a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham medical school. "The ongoing progression of antibiotic resistance has now been combined with a lack of alternatives."

What makes gonorrhea so hard to treat is its ability to acquire resistance genes and mutations that enable it to survive and adapt to each new threat. Gonorrhea has another nasty advantage over other infectious diseases: the genes of other types of bacteria can lose resistance once they're not exposed to antibiotics; gonorrhea holds onto its resistance genes.


NBC