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We're Screwed: Some Strains of Gonorrhea are Now Totally Drug Resistant

If you're one of the 700,000 estimated who will catch the "'clap'":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonorrhea this year, your life just got even _more_ shitty. According to new research, a new superstrain of gonorrhea may be resistant to all drug...

If you’re one of the 700,000 estimated who will catch the ‘clap’ this year, your life just got even more shitty. According to new research, a new superstrain of gonorrhea may be resistant to all drug treatments.

A study just released in the New England Journal of Medicine reports that it’s time to start issuing warnings that gonorrhea, the second most common communicable disease in the US, continues to prove increasingly resistant to existing treatments and medications.

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Let’s face it. Gonorrhea is pretty much the foulest of STDs (I’ll spare you the details, but you can read more about the awesomely gross disease here), but at some point in time we’ve all most likely known somebody who has had it. What’s worrisome is that the tenacious bug has exhibited increasing resistance to treatments over the years.

The cause of gonorrhea is a bacterium called Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which over the decades has checked off resistance to different antibiotics and other anti-microbial agents as easily as you check off items on a shopping list. In the 1940s, it first became resistant to sulfanilamide, then penicillin and tetracyclines in the 1980s, and finally fluoroquinolones by 2007. More recently, strains have been found that completely resist antibiotics.

In the study just release, the microbe has finally exhibited signs of resistance to cephalosporins, usually the last line of defense for treating the disease.

Judith N. Wasserheit, professor and vice chair of the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington in Seattle, and co-author of the study issued an urgent call to action to find alternative treatments for the disease as a result of the study’s findings.

"It is time to sound the alarm," she said. "Though there is no evidence yet of treatment failures in the United States, trends in decreased susceptibility coupled with a history of emerging resistance and reported treatment failures in other countries point to a likelihood of failures on the horizon and a need for urgent action."

In all seriousness, it may be easy to poke fun at the clap, but this study raises a harrowing question: What happens when we run out of treatment options for one of the most common communicable diseases worldwide? Gonorrhea still finds its way to a large chunk of the population, and mostly within marginalized demographics. The scientists who conducted the research are calling for funding for developing alternative treatments now, otherwise we may find ourselves in a world where gonorrhea becomes an all-threatening superbug ready to raise unchallenged havoc on society.