“The FDA has approved two new oral antibiotics to treat gonorrhea, the first new oral therapies for uncomplicated gonorrhea in decades. These new drugs are especially important because the bacteria that cause gonorrhea have been evolving resistance to most existing treatments,” reports The Doomslayer.
The New York Times notes that “Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, is a wily nemesis that has outsmarted every previous antibiotic deployed against it, including the sole therapy that remains effective.” So discovering new antiobiotics to fight gonorrhea is important.
On December 12, the FDA approved a new antibiotic, zoliflodacin, after a single oral dose of it was found to be safe and effective against gonorrhea in a clinical trial. Over 80 million people are infected with gonorrhea each year.
On December 11, the FDA approved the use of another recently-developed antibiotic to treat gonorrhea. That drug, gepotidacin, had previously been used to treat urinary tract infections in women.
After these two drug approvals, the New York Times reports that
Infectious disease experts were buoyed by the news. “Antibiotic resistance is something that keeps all of us up at night so anytime a new antimicrobial comes to market is a cause for celebration,” said Dr. Aniruddha Hazra…In the United States, there were nearly 600,000 cases of gonorrhea last year…Gonorrhea does not cause symptoms in about half of those infected, allowing it to easily spread. But in others, the pathogen can lead to joint pain and burning urination. Left untreated, it can cause infertility and sterility, blindness in infants or even death.
Resistance to the last remaining treatment, an injection of ceftriaxone that is sometimes combined with a dose of azithromycin, has been rising. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization issued a warning about the spread of drug-resistant gonorrhea throughout much of the world, with especially worrisome caseloads in the Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam.
In other good news, “Botswana has reduced the mother-to-child HIV transmission rate to 1.2 percent, an exceptionally low rate for a country with such a large HIV problem.” Now, fewer than 100 babies per year in Botswana are “born with the disease,” notes The Doomslayer. Over a fifth of the people in Botswana used to have HIV, closest to the highest rate in the world. Now, only about 16% do, and at least three other countries have higher HIV and AIDS rates than Botswana does (Swaziland, Lesotho, and South Africa).
On the other hand, syphilis spiked in the U.S. between 2018 and 2022. Many sexual diseases increased in the United States in 2021.
