New untreatable strain of gonorrhea found

QUEBEC CITY, July 11 (UPI) -- A new gonorrhea strain can't be treated by available antibiotics, an international team of scientists announced at a conference in Canada.

Dr. Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria at Orebro University Hospital, Sweden, and colleagues say the mutated strain is likely to transform a once easily treatable infection into a global threat to public health.

The team identified a new variant of the bacterium that causes gonorrhea, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, also known as H041, as resistance to all cephalosporin-class antibiotics -- the last class of drugs still effective in treating gonorrhea.

"This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery. Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it," Unemo says in a statement.

"While it is still too early to assess if this new strain has become widespread, the history of newly emergent resistance in the bacterium suggests that it may spread rapidly unless new drugs and effective treatment programs are developed."

The findings were presented at the 19th conference of the International Society for Sexually Transmitted Disease Research in Quebec City.