African Traditional Herbal Research Clinic STD's ... - Blackherbals.com

Continued from page 26 –Incurable Gonorrhea may be Next
Superbug
for more cases than any other age group. If they aren’t
cured, they risk pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility or
ectopic pregnancies. People infected with gonorrhea are
also about three times more likely to become infected
with HIV should they come into contact with the virus.
“The other major cost is infection of children born to
infected mothers,” Hook explained. “And rarely you can
get gonorrheal infections of heart valves, and arthritis.”
History of being hard to treat
Gonorrhea has a long history of evading medicine’s
attempts to cure it. In the 1930s, sulfa-based drugs
worked, but soon lost potency as the bacteria adapted.
Penicillin came up to bat in the 1940s. In New York City,
Los Angeles, and points in between, posters appeared
stating “Penicillin Cures Gonorrhea in 4 Hours,”
sometimes underneath words urging citizens to buy war
bonds to “Thrash the Axis.”
Just as defeating Hitler and the Japanese emperor had
become an all-consuming national priority, health
officials, armed with the new miracle drug penicillin,
offered hope that the scourge of “VD” could be
wiped out, too.
Penicillin was a miracle, but eventually doctors had to
use more and more to kill the bug. Still, a shot of
penicillin remained the treatment of choice until 1985,
when rising resistance to penicillin, and the fact that
many people are allergic to it, forced health officials to
give other antibiotics their turns.
But as they did, strains of the bacteria morphed to make
the antibiotics less effective. A February report from a
group of Taiwanese doctors found that during the five
years between 1999 and 2004, 40 percent of gonorrhea
isolated from their patients was resistant to penicillin,
tetracycline, erythromycin and ciprofloxacin, all drugs
which used to kill off gonorrhea like magic bullets.
The cephalosporins are all that’s left.
In May of 2009, doctors at Sydney, Australia’s Prince of
Wales Hospital reported two cases of failed treatment of
gonorrhea of the pharynx (typically resulting from oral
sex or oral-anal contact). The drug they used is called
ceftriaxone, a cephalosporin given by injection. There
have also been scattered reports of increasing drug
resistance to the most commonly used pill form of
cephalosporin, although not in the U.S. so far, said Dr.
Kimberly Workowski, associate professor of medicine at
Emory University and the CDC’s coordinator of STD
treatment guidelines. The CDC monitors the issue
through its Gonorrhea Isolate Surveillance Project which
receives reports from health clinics all over the
country.
Workowski is concerned, though. For one thing, some
people who are allergic to penicillin may also be
allergic to cephalosporins.
Since people with some forms of gonorrhea may not
show symptoms, their partners may have no idea
they're infected. The pill form of cephalosporin, which
can be used for uncomplicated rectal or urogenital
infections, is “only 70 percent effective” in treating
pharyngeal gonorrhea, she noted. Since infection of the
pharynx often carries no symptoms, people treated for
urogenital infection may not know they carry a
pharyngeal infection, too. That gives the disease a safe
harbor from which it can launch infections of more
people.
Resistance has tended to follow geography and sexual
orientation, Workowski explained. “Traditionally
southeast Asia has developed resistant isolates and then
there is a slow spread across [the Pacific], eventually
coming to the U.S.,” she said. Resistant strains also
tend to show up first in men who have sex with men.
Other drug-resistant STDs
Resistance could also become an issue in other
bacterial STDs. About 30 percent of females who
contract gonorrhea are co-infected with chlamydia.
While chlamydia seems to respond well to medication
so far, a small number of strains have shown signs of
developing drug-resistance, says Workowski. Hook,
however, says he doesn’t know of any resistant strains.
Syphilis has already defeated one drug used to treat it,
azithromycin. Between 2000 and 2004, the prevalence
of azithromycin-resistant syphilis in one San
Francisco clinic jumped from zero percent to 56
percent.
“We have since been looking at azithromycin mutations
in strains from all over the country and world,” said
Sheila Lukehart, research professor of medicine at the
University of Washington and an author of the New
England Journal of Medicine report about the San
Francisco clinic. “We’ve found a very a broad
distribution of the specific mutation that gives syphilis
antibiotic resistance.”
The good news is that penicillin still works against
syphilis; the treatment consists of two shots, one in
each butt cheek. No credible data suggests that syphilis
has been able to adapt to penicillin, probably, Lukehart
can’t change it. Still, the loss of azithromycin makes
infections tough to treat in people allergic to penicillin
Continued on page 33
-27- Traditional African Clinic October 2011