By DANIEL YEE, Associated Press Writer 24 minutes ago
ATLANTA - The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea is now among the "superbugs" resistant to common antibiotics, leading U.S. health officials to recommend wider use of a different class of drugs to avert a public health crisis.
The resistant form accounts for more than one in every four gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men in Philadelphia and nearly that many in San Francisco, according to a survey that led to Thursday's recommendation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Gonorrhea, which is believed to infect more than 700,000 people in the United States each year, can leave both men and women infertile and puts people at higher risk of getting the
AIDS virus.
Since the early 1990s, a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolones has provided a relatively easy cure. These antibiotics, taken as tablets, include the drug Cipro.
But a growing number of gonorrhea cases is resistant to those drugs, and officials at the
CDC for the first time are urging doctors to stop using fluoroquinolones and switch to cephalosporins, a different class of antibiotics, to treat everyone.
Those drugs — which include the generic ceftriaxone or brand name Rocephin, made by Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG — must be given as a shot and aren't as readily stocked as Cipro on most doctor's shelves.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070412/ap_on_he_me/resistant_gonorrhea;_ylt=AoDagUIvna_C85UPBuj_yALMWM0FThe article goes on to mention that there are no new drugs in development for the treatment of gonorrhea. What I'd like to know is if this is due to the profit margin for this type of drug, or is it due to a lack of funding for research? It would be much easier to stop this before it gets out of control again, rather than let it continue to evolve to a point of a major health crisis.
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