Return of the Clap

[xchrom]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=return-of-the-clap


Gonorrhea colony, as seen under a microscope
Image: Juergen Berger/Photo Researchers, Inc.


Mark Pandori was worried. It was 2008, and he had just read the latest in a string of reports from Japan. The articles all described patients infected with a particular strain of gonorrhea that was less susceptible than usual to an important class of antibiotics. Pandori, director of the laboratory at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, knew that gonorrhea had become resistant to other antibiotics in past decades. Each time, the resistance seemed to arise in Asia and spread to California. He wondered if something new was heading across the Pacific.

The latest report from Japan described a test that could identify resistant strains of bacteria by isolating and amplifying the culprit gene. Pandori tried the procedure on 54 samples of gonorrhea bacteria collected that year from men in San Francisco. Five samples, or 9 percent, contained the altered gene. When he analyzed the bacteria in the lab, he found that they—like the Japanese strains—possessed partial resistance to cephalosporins, the only antibiotics that still work reliably and inexpensively against gonorrhea.

Pandori and his research partner at the time, a health department epidemiologist named Pennan Barry, were alarmed and baffled. No physicians in the state had reported any difficulties treating patients with gonorrhea. Cephalosporin resistance had apparently infiltrated California without anyone noticing. Perhaps it had started spreading across the country as well.

Last summer a surveillance network run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed their fears. Using a different test, the CDC demonstrated that up to 1.4 percent of 5,900 gonorrhea bacterial samples from around the U.S. had diminished susceptibility to cephalosporins, meaning they would succumb only to unusually high doses. A New England Journal of Medicine editorial published in February said the occurrence of that partial resistance increased 17 times between 2006 and 2011. “The threat of untreatable gonorrhea is emerging rapidly,” the editorial warned.

[MineralMan]

1. Not a good thing at all.

The increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria is very, very alarming. This is another example. I hope an entirely new class of drugs will emerge soon.

[Warpy]

2. They sure won't emerge in the US

We'll have to look to less profit driven systems for antibiotics.

We might even have to move to the bacteriophage model. We might be out of fungal and sulfa antibiotics.

It's no wonder this stuff is moving to the US, we certainly enabled it: station randy young males all over the world at military bases, fail to regulate the way drug companies sell powerful drugs like antibiotics, watch hookers gulp antibiotics so they can charge more for no condom sex, and watch the bugs take over.

We have been incredibly stupid about antibiotics, which should have been one of the most tightly regulated class of drugs out there instead of recreational drugs that most people can leave alone.

[MineralMan]

3. By the time they figured out that bacteria developed resistance,

it was too late. Back in the 50s, when I was a kid, the family doc gave you a penicillin shot every time you sneezed, it seemed.

However, there's plenty of research going on in the US on this front. Lots of money to be made by whoever comes up with a safe, effective alternative. I think it will take a new approach, though, not just development of more new antibiotics based on old concepts.