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The Last Drug That Can Fight Gonorrhea Is Starting to Falter - WIRED
Feb 01, 2023 1 min, 12 secs
If it gains the ability to evade those drugs, our only options will be desperate searches for others that aren’t approved yet—or a return to a time when untreated gonorrhea caused crippling arthritis, blinded infants as they were born, and made men infertile through testicle damage and women via pelvic inflammatory disease.

“This situation is both a warning and an opportunity,” says Kathleen Roosevelt, director of Massachusetts’ Division of STD Prevention and HIV Surveillance, emphasizing that rates of gonorrhea are at historic highs across the US.

Gay and bisexual men who take PrEP, pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV, must be tested for STDs periodically to keep their prescriptions, and that is equally likely to happen in private offices or group practices.

The possibility that people at risk would want to keep their sexual health separate from the rest of their medical care, and might not be diligent about coming back to clinics, drove a change in testing that accidentally paved the way for gonorrhea to surge.

In the 1990s, clinics began switching from traditional ways of identifying bacteria—take a swab, swish it over a plate, incubate the culture until something grows—to nucleic-acid rapid tests that were more sensitive and delivered faster results.

The CDC runs the Gonococcal Isolate Surveillance Project, which tracks the emergence of resistance in 32 cities and one military base by funding health departments to collect at least 25 bacterial samples a month from men who have tested positive.

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