Developments in Brief : Strains of Gonorrhea Prove Drug-Resistant

Bacteria that cause gonorrhea are quickly developing resistance to another antibiotic, and the world may be running out of drugs to cure this common venereal disease, Army doctors said.

Their dire warning was based on recent findings that 8% of servicemen infected with gonorrhea in South Korea had strains of the germ that could withstand spectinomycin, a relatively new drug against the venereal disease.

Researchers expect this resistance to eventually spread to the United States, where gonorrhea germs are already developing resistance to penicillin and tetracycline. “We are beginning to run out of drugs,” said Dr. John W. Boslego. “What’s available currently is being diminished faster than we are replenishing it with new drugs.”

Boslego, a researcher at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, published the findings in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

There is currently no shortage of drugs to treat gonorrhea. But they are several times more expensive than penicillin or tetracycline, and some of them are given by injection instead of as pills.

Last year, there were 896,383 reported cases of gonorrhea in the United States, up slightly from the 883,826 cases in 1985. But researchers believe that as many as 2 million cases of gonorrhea go unreported every year.

The military began using spectinomycin as the main treatment for gonorrhea in Korea in 1981. In their newly published study, doctors surveyed 97 U.S. servicemen who were treated for gonorrhea infections in Korea during two weeks in 1985. They found that spectinomycin failed to wipe out the germs in eight of them. In a follow-up study, they calculated that the antibiotic fails to cure 12% of the servicemen in Korea who get gonorrhea. The military has since switched to ceftriaxone as the primary drug for gonorrhea.