Thanks to Bobave for linking to the AP’s retraction of part of the story originally quoted. They did stubbornly keep their alarmist title. In the ECCIE National Coed discussion yesterday FlectiNonFrangi posted an informative link to a followup story that merits being quoted at some length.
http://www.eccie.net/showthread.php?t=734247
“Settle down: no 'sex superbug' in the US, despite reports
http://vitals.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/06/18088680-settle-down-no-sex-superbug-in-the-us-despite-reports?lite&ocid=msnhp&pos=3
By JoNel Aleccia, Senior Writer, NBC News
"Reports of a new “sex superbug” threatening the U.S. aren’t true, public health officials say, even as they reiterate worries about the rise of drug-resistant gonorrhea.“The sky is not falling -- yet,” said Dr. Kimberly Workowski, a professor of infectious disease at Emory University in Atlanta.
Several media outlets, including The Associated Press, last week reported that a rare strain of gonorrhea known as HO41 had been detected in Hawaii. That would have raised alarms nationwide, signaling the first domestic sign of a strain that's been found to be resistant to ceftriaxone, an injectable antibiotic that is the last-resort treatment for the sexually transmitted infection.
But the Hawaii cases, first discovered in May 2011, were actually a different strain, H11S8, resistant to a different drug, the antibiotic azithromycin, state health officials confirmed. That’s been a known problem for a while, Workowski added. The AP later withdrew the inaccurate report."
"In fact, the HO41 strain hasn’t been detected anywhere in the world since 2009, when it was found in a Japanese sex worker, said Dr. Robert Kirkcaldy, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. *A handful of other cases that are resistant to ceftriaxone have been detected in other countries, but they’re different isolates, he added.
The false reports have put public health experts in the unusual position of refuting an error while also emphasizing that the threat of untreatable gonorrhea in the U.S. is very real."
“We think that that could be just a matter of a year or two,” said William Smith, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.”
What is being missed here is that Many infectious microbes are in the process of becoming immune to ALL antibiotics. Just a matter of time. Like human-caused global warming it is probably already too late to stop the process. It is going to happen. And no one seems to be especially interested in taking steps to minimize the disaster, not drug companies who are uninterested in new antibiotics or novel anti-microbials because they are not profitable enough compared to drugs for chronic illnesses that have to be taken every day for life. Not politicians who could divert government funding from the world’s largest war machine to research programs to prevent us from going back to the situation before World War II when there was little available to treat bacterial infections.
It’s true that humankind survived until penicillin was discovered but that meant standing by helplessly while sick people’s immune systems battled unaided against aggressive bacteria and watching a large proportion of them lose. When, in the foreseeable future, most of the old diseases defeated by antibiotics return with a grievance I think gonorrhea will be a minor concern. It at least is easy to avoid unlike totally drug resistant tuberculosis or malaria as global warming pushes tropical maladies steadily North.
Sex Superbug
