Gonorrhea As the Next Superbug

WrongSizeGlass writes "Reuters is reporting that Gonorrhea risks becoming a superbug: 'The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea risks becoming a drug-resistant "superbug" if doctors do not devise new ways of treating it, a leading sexual health expert said.'"

Comments

Re:I've got the cure

[rubycodez]

wrong, throat gonorrhea is quite common, and transmissible to your penis via oral sex.

Re:Needed crouwd thinning??

[dunkelfalke]

Wrong. Antibiotics are there to kill off all the non-resistant strains until the amount of bacteria low enough so the immune system can take care of the rest, this way preventing that the resistant strains survive.
If an antibiotic treatment suddenly stops before all non-resistant strains were killed, the resistant strains survive and multiply and soon become dominant strains.

Re:probiotics for the vagina

[iroll]

This is not "alternative medical thinking." Alternative Medical Thinking would be making a homeopathic yogurt dilution and believing that the spirit of the yogurt was imprinted on the solvent. Doctors (like Dr. Drew) are professionals, just like programmers. They can be wrong, or behind the times, or attention-grabbing without actually being representative of the state of their field.

Treating and encouraging your natural bacterial flora is mainstream medicine, and the yogurt trick for encouraging health "down there" is something a lot of doctors will pass along. I can't speak to your personal experience, but anecdotes =/= mainstream medicine. Your family physician will probably also tell you to eat some yogurt when they give you antibiotics to clear up some strep throat or another nasty bacteria, because it'll help replenish the good bacteria in your gut that you have been eliminating, and keep you from getting a monster case of the runs.

And there are the studies on GM bacteria mouthwashes, to colonize your mouth with bacteria that out-compete your old, cavity-causing flora with something safer. And the studies that show that while we've generally eliminated the bacteria that cause stomach ulcers, we've also caused some downstream problems because those bacteria were part of a balancing act in the ecosystem in there. The bacterial flora are a hot areas of research.

I'm not a doctor, but I have a degree in bioengineering, and I have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.