August 10, 2012 (USA TODAY) -- Federal health officials took
steps Thursday to head off the emergence of a new gonorrhea
"superbug" that is resistant to standard antibiotics. Gonorrhea,
a sexually transmitted disease that infects 700,000 Americans a
year, is resistant to all but one class of antibiotics and could
soon become untreatable, federal health officials warned.
Doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued
new treatment guidelines, hoping to delay the day when standard
drugs no longer work. The guidelines call for switching from a
single pill to combination therapy: a shot, to which the
gonorrhea bacteria seems less likely to develop resistance,
along with a different type of antibiotic pill. Gonorrhea is a
major cause of infertility among women. It increases a person's
risk of becoming infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS,
and of spreading it, the CDC says. Doctors detected a highly
resistant superbug form of gonorrhea in Japan in 2009, says P.
Frederick Sparling, a profe