In a study released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a group of scientists led by Vanessa Allen of Public Health Ontario, found that 6.7 percent of patients with gonorrhea at a Toronto clinic still had the disease after a round of cephalosporins, the last effective oral antibiotic used to treat the disease. Of 133 patients who returned for a "test of cure" visit, nine remained gonorrhea-positive. This is the first time cephalosporin-resistant gonorrhea has been found in humans in North America.
Cephalosporins are a class of B-lactam drugs. B-lactams include penicillins, monobactams and carbapenems. Without having use of these antibiotics, not much is left to treat gonorrhea. After this, I believe intravenous Vancomycin would be the treatment of choice to clear the infection. Vancomycin is extremely powerful and usually only reserved for very serious infections such as MRSA (as long as it's not VRSA).
Currently, based on CSLI guidelines, labs are only required to test for B-lactam resistance and send the culture to Public Health for further testing. I can't imagine the effect on labs if this antibiotic resistance version of Neisseria gonnorheae continues to spread.
-K
Health-related articles like yours should be read by everyone out there. Currently, I fear that the trend of prescribing antibiotics for nearly all common ailments like sinusitis will definitely result in pathogens growing resilient to these medicines, and growing right into a super bug. Just cannot imagine this kind of a scenario.
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