Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea Turning Into Untreatable Superbug

Gonorrhea is rapidly becoming an untreatable superbug that is at least sometimes resistant to the drugs usually used to treat it.

Gonorrhea is spread through sexual contact and affects about 78 million people around the world each year, the World Health Organization reported in July, and 97 percent of the 77 countries surveyed between 2009 and 2014 have said that drug-resistant strains are present there.

The typical treatment for the disease has been a combination of ceftriaxone and azithromyacin, the New York Daily News reported, but the bacteria involved are evolving to resist these antibiotics more and more.

"At the moment, all cases of gonorrhea are still treatable using some combination of available antibiotics," Dr. Xavier Didelot, Imperial College London senior lecturer in the department of infectious disease and epidemiology, said, according to Time magazine. "But at the current rate at which resistance is developing, we could find ourselves facing a situation where no antibiotic works, which would mean a return to the pre-antibiotic era."

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