In one of my previous posts, I briefly talked about a never-ending war between science and disease-causing bacteria. We come up with antibiotics and they stubbornly develop a resistance to them. It doesn’t help that we over-prescribe antibiotics here in America and that they are sold as over-the-counter candies in much of the rest of the world.
neisseria gonorrhea bacteria (BBC)
There is now a new public health scare. According to BBC, a new strain of bacteria that causes gonorrhea, called H041, has been reported in Japan. It has apparently become resistant to all cephalosporin-based antibiotics, which are closely related to penicillins.
Hank Campbell from Science 2.0 states
The ideal scenario, since we can’t control behavior… is a vaccine but N. gonorrhea mutates quickly and is too complex to develop a vaccine. It can also promote antibiotic resistance in other microbes through gene transfer.
BBC is probably just over-dramatizing the whole issue to get people to react and get more traffic to their website. I am sure that for now the doctors will give some combinations of antibiotics to target this new strain just like they do for any other bacteria that develops resistance, but it will still be something to keep an eye on and follow as new information is revealed.
