Gonorrhea

2023: Highly drug-resistant gonorrhea strain first detected in US

In the US, a strain of [1] gonorrhea with high drug resistance was first detected, raising concerns among public health officials about a shortage of treatments and the future when gonorrhea may become untreatable.

Gonorrhea is the second most common bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. after chlamydia, and its incidence has skyrocketed in recent years, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported in January 2023.

"There's nothing we threw into gonorrhea that it doesn't develop resistance to," says Supriya Mehta, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "The speed of its evolution exceeds the speed of developing new drugs."

Antibiotic resistance of bacteria and fungi is a global public health challenge. Multidrug-resistant pathogens, or "superbags," could kill more than 10 million people annually by 2050 unless new antibiotics are developed, the WHO said.

1948: US scientists deliberately infect syphilis and gonorrhea of Guatemalan citizens

In 2010, the president USA Barack Obama deeply apologized over the phone Guatemala syphilis to the president for the fact that in the 1940s, American scientists deliberately infected Guatemalan prisoners, mentally ill and military personnel with gonorrhea in order to study ways to treat sexually transmitted diseases with penicillin. As a result, about one and a half thousand people were injured - including prostitutes used in the experiment (and not knowing about it).