Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Finally Gets Attention Abandonment of routine MIC testing in 1990s now seen as a mistake

After months of painstaking lab work, Alan Katz, MD, MPH, and his team were surprised. Their culturing and analyzing bacteria samples in his Hawaii clinic showed that seven patients were carrying strains of gonorrhea with increased resistance to the current -- and only -- treatment regimen for a sexually transmitted disease that affects an estimated 800,000 Americans each year. As Katz, who heads the research team at the Hawaii State Department of Health's Diamond Head STD Clinic, related to MedPage Today, the individuals were successfully treated, but what about the next time? "OMG, we might be closer to treatment failure than we thought," he said. The cluster, identified earlier this year, is the first group of gonorrhea infections in the U.S. to show increased resistance to both of the last two drugs approved to be used against it: ceftriaxone and azithromycin. Katz's alarming discovery is the latest development in a situation so concerning that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared gonorrhea one of three urgent antibiotic resistance threats in the United States (the other two are Clostridium Difficile and Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae). Two-drug therapy already failed with a patient in the U.K, and the worry is that this could become commonplace. http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/STDs/62660?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2017-01-23&eun=g721819d0r&pos=4