Over the weekend, a particularly awful pair of words began in trends on social media: super gonorrhea. That’s because the World Health Organization recently warned that the pandemic is helping to fuel the rise of antibiotics –resistant bacteria, including bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Unfortunately, the situation is only probable to worsen.
Antibiotic resistance has been a slow production crisis for decades, buThe effects eventually become difficult to ignore. Currently, it is estimated that the so-called superbugs kill around 35,000 American annually, as well as 700,000 people globally.
One of the most worrying superbug threats today is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the homonymous bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Gonorrhea is not usually 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. Bacteria can also be transmitted from a mother to her baby during birth, triggering an infection that can be fatal or cause serious problems, such as blindness. Notable Symptoms include green or yellow discharge from the genitals and pain during urination.
These bacteria are scary because they are becoming impervious at firstline antibiotics used to treat them. In 2018, British doctors reported finding a man with the first known case of gonorrhea who was extremely resistant to the combination therapy used in most countries as standard treatment: the antibiotics ceftriaxone and azithromycin. Although the man’s gonorrhea was treatable with another antibiotic, the case confirmed the worst fears of experts. Other cases of super gonorrhea, as well as other extremely resistant sexually transmitted infections, have been documented since then.
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Throughout this year, there have been experts from the World Health Organization and elsewhere calling the antibiotic resistance alarm is getting worse because of the pandemic. For one, doctors usually prescribed antibiotics to patients hospitalized with covid-19, a disease caused by a virus (antibiotics usually do not work against viruses). Apparently, this is because hospitalized patients can develop secondary infections caused by bacteria. Early research had also suggested that the antibiotic azithromycin might have an added antiviral effect, possibly in combination with other drugs such as hydroxychloroquine.
Since then, however, the studies have had found that azithromycin, taken alone or with hydroxychloroquine, did not have 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.
That brings us to last week, when the British newspaper The Sun reported on the WHO warning about gonorrhea. In addition to the above issues, the WHO also noted that the pandemic causes people to delay STI testing and medical care, increasing the risk that people will never find out about their gonorrhea or even try to self-medicate. improperly.. abusive and excessive use of antibiotics, especially azithromycin, only adds more dynamite to the powder keg which is super gonorrhea.
“Such a situation may fuel the development of gonorrhea resistance,” said a WHO spokesman. said Sun.
What’s worse is that rates of gonorrhea and other STIs have risen in many places recently. The US, for example, had a record number of STIs reported in 2018, with cases of gonorrhea rising for the fifth consecutive year. May (quite likely) that the pandemic has diminished the sexual activity of many people this year. But the antibioticresistant bacteria have not disappeared, and cases of super gonorrhea and other highly resistant infections will no doubt continue to grow in the years to come.
There is still hope that newer antibiotics are enough and other therapies may be developed over time for avoid the worst-case scenario, in which common bacterial infections become as dangerous as a century ago. And scientists are working vaccines for diseases such as gonorrhea. But it doesn’t exist a clear solution on the horizon, and the clock is ticking. In 2014, a report commissioned by the British government estimate that, if nothing was done, annual worldwide deaths caused by antibioticsResistant infections would overshadow cancer deaths by 2050, with about 10 million deaths a year. Until then, super gonorrhea will be the least of our worries.