Gonorrhea Is Now One Antibiotic Away from Being Untreatable
Remember when we told you late last year that gonorrhea, an STD
that can cause infertility and death, is "possibly becoming
untreatable"? Well, now the disease is closer to untreatable
than it has been since doctors devised a way to treat it in the
first place. We're down to just one antibiotic that can
effectively fight the disease, and after that, uhh, umm—have we
tried fire?  The cause for alarm comes from the CDC's cheerily
named "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report," which today
notes:  Gonorrhea is a major cause of serious reproductive
complications in women and can facilitate human immunodeficiency
virus (HIV) transmission. Effective treatment is a cornerstone
of U.S. gonorrhea control efforts, but treatment of gonorrhea
has been complicated by the ability of Neisseria gonorrhoeae to
develop antimicrobial resistance.  In layman's terms, gonorrhea
has gradually grown resistant to nearly every antibiotic we've
created over the past several de