JoyfulC 132299 Report post Posted December 30, 2015 http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/gonorrhea-s-resistance-could-soon-make-it-untreatable 2 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Phaedrus 209521 Report post Posted December 31, 2015 "could" really ought to be replaced by "will be", unless we get serious about coming up with new kinds of antibiotics. And it's not just gonorrhea - there are quite a few other bacteria that are also rapidly evolving resistance to antibiotics. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
JoyfulC 132299 Report post Posted January 3, 2016 Yeah, I was wondering about that. For one thing, I remember articles about antibiotic resistant gonorrhoea from back during the Vietnam war era. Also, I've read many articles recently about how we're coming to the end of the antibiotic age, primarily due to the use of antibiotics in food production. In the situation described in the article, it seems like the goal is to encourage doctors and clinics to correctly prescribe. Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Phaedrus 209521 Report post Posted January 5, 2016 Gonorrhea has been steadily acquiring immunity to antibiotics since we started hitting it with Penicillin, so back in the Vietnam era it had probably just become resistant to something else. It has now become immune to almost all antibiotics. But yes, on a more general level, it isn't just gonorrhea that's doing this - many other gram-negative bacteria are also at it (E. coli being the most common). Correct prescription and use of antibiotics is hugely important - there's nothing worse than giving a bug a dose of an antibiotic that doesn't actually kill it, because that gives it a golden opportunity to mutate and evolve resistance to that drug, and that's why there's the emphasis on what doctors and clinics do. But as you say, the levels of antibiotics in livestock are also a huge problem. 1 Quote Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
