Gonorrhea Could Join Growing List of Untreatable Diseases

[xchrom]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/02/08/gonorrhea-untreatable-diseases/

The arms race between humanity and disease-causing bacteria is drawing to a close—and the bacteria are winning. The latest evidence: gonorrhea is becoming resistant to all standard antibiotic treatment.

Gonorrhea is one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases in the world—with about 600,000 cases diagnosed in the U.S. each year. A few years ago, investigators started seeing cases of infection that did not easily respond to treatment with a group of drugs called cephalosporins, which are currently the last line of defense against this particular infection. Now, the number of drug-resistant cases has grown so much in the U.S. and elsewhere that gonorrheal infection may soon become untreatable, according to doctors writing in the February 9 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

If it seems to you that the drumbeat of bad news with respect to antibiotic resistance has become louder and more insistent in the past few years, you would be right:

Researchers reported in January that they had for the first time collected samples of E. coli bacteria from the Antarctic with particularly dangerous drug-resistance genes. The dispersal of drug resistance genes via E. coli is particularly worrisome because that bacterium lives normally in the human intestine along with thousands of other species of bacteria. From that fertile ground, there’s practically no stopping the widespread dissemination of bacterial resistance genes.

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. I saw this coming...worked in Pharma for 25 years and watched as they headed for

more niche-type issues that would bring huge returns (really - restless leg syndrome?) - but very little work in antibiotics. Coming back to haunt us all......

[izquierdista]

2. Time to culture more fungi

Research on fungi is at a pitifully small level, and they are the ones that have been winning the war with bacteria for hundreds of millions of years. Right now, somewhere out in nature, there is a fungus that is eating Neisseria for lunch and we need to find it. But as you say, that won't improve the bottom line for the next quarterly report, so it doesn't get done. It has to be funded from some source with a long time horizon -- the government.