Over the weekend, a particularly awful couple of words started tending on social networks: super gonorrhea. That’s because the World Health Organization recently warned that the pandemic is helping to boost the rise in antibiotics.resistant bacteria, including the bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Unfortunately, the situation is just likely get worse.
Antibiotic resistance has been a slow fermentation crisis for decades, butthe effects are finally becoming difficult to ignore. Currently, so-called superbugs are believed to kill about 35,000 Americans annually, as well as 700,000 people globally.
One of the most worrying superbug threats today is Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the homonymous bacteria that causes gonorrhea. Gonorrhea is generally not deadly and usually has no symptoms, bbut, if left untreated, it can cause complications such as arthritis, joint pain and rashes, as well as infertility and chronic pelvic pain. The bacteria can also be transmitted from the mother to the baby during delivery, triggering an infection that can be fatal or cause serious problems such as blindness. Remarkable symptoms include green or yellow discharge from Organs genitals and pain when urinating.
These bacteria are scary because they are becoming waterproof for the firstline antibiotics used to treat them. In 2018, UK doctors reported to find a man with the first known case of gonorrhea who was highly resistant to the combination therapy used in most countries as a standard treatment: the antibiotics ceftriaxone and azithromycin. Although the man’s gonorrhea was treatable with another antibiotic, the case confirmed the experts’ worst fears. Other cases of super gonorrhea, as well as other highly resistant sexually transmitted infections, have been documented since then.
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Throughout this year, experts from the World Health Organization and elsewhere have been sounding the alarm about antibiotic resistance worsening due to the pandemic. On the one hand, doctors routinely prescribe antibiotics for patients hospitalized with covid-19, a disease caused by a virus (antibiotics, as a rule, do not work against viruses). This is apparently done because hospitalized patients can develop 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 like hydroxychloroquine.
Since then, however, studies found that azithromycin, taken alone or with hydroxychloroquine, had no life-saving impact at covid-19 patients. Another research has found that doctors generally prescribe antibiotics to patients without any evidence that they have bacterial infections.
This brings us to last week, when the British newspaper The Sun reported the WHO alert on gonorrhea. In addition to the above issues, WHO also noted that the pandemic is probably causing people to delay STI testing and medical care, increasing the risk that people will never find out about their gonorrhea or even attempt to improperly self-medicate.. O the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, particularly azithromycin, is only adding more dynamite to the powder barrel which is supergonorrhea.
“Such a situation could fuel the emergence of resistance to gonorrhea,” a WHO spokesman said The sun.
Worse, rates of gonorrhea and other STDs have increased in many places recently. The USA, for example, had a record number STDs reported in 2018, with gonorrhea cases rising for the fifth consecutive year. It’s possible (even likely) that the pandemic has decreased sexual activity for many people this year. But antibiotic-resistant bacteria have not disappeared, and cases of supergonorrhea and other highly resistant infections will undoubtedly continue to increase in the years to come.
There is still hope that new antibiotics and other therapies can be developed in time avoid worse-case scenario, where common bacterial infections become as dangerous as they were a century ago. Scientists are also working on vaccines for diseases like gonorrhea. But there is not a clear solution on the horizon, and time is running out. In 2014, a report commissioned by the UK government estimated that if nothing was done, annual deaths worldwide from antibioticsresistant infections would eclipse cancer deaths by 2050, with about 10 million dead each year. At that time, supergonorrhea will be the least of our concerns.