A new, untreatable strain of the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea has been discovered in Japan, according to an international team of infectious disease experts. The strain, named H041, is resistant to all known forms of antibiotics. The finding was presented Monday with extensive laboratory evidence at a conference in Quebec City, Canada — and it comes just three days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that U.S. gonorrhea samples had being showing new signs of drug resistance as well. Although drugs have remained effective in almost all U.S. cases, the CDC said that analysis of bacteria samples taken from 2000 to 2010 showed that the gonorrhea bug was becoming less and less susceptible to the frontline drugs, cephalosporins, as the years went by. “This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery,” Dr. Magnus Unemo said in a statement about H041. Unemo, based at the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, worked with Japanese colleagues to characterize the new H041 multidrug-resistant gonorrhea strain. Multidrug resistance is “predictable,” in Unemo’s words, because most gonorrhea strains worldwide are already resistant to at least one major class of antibiotics. Bacteria become resistant to antibiotics through evolution. Some naturally occurring genetic variation exists among Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterial organism that causes gonorrhea, and that means that any one given bacterium may, by chance, be slightly more susceptible to antibiotics than another. When a colony of bacteria first comes in contact with antibiotics, therefore, the antibiotics will kill off the most susceptible bacteria at higher rates. This leaves behind a disproportionately robust batch of surviving bacteria, and when the survivors reproduce, they pass on their more-robust-than-average genes to their offspring. With repeated exposure to antibiotics, and over many generations of bacteria, eventually all the bacteria that are spreading are drug-resistant. In the U.S., gonorrhea strains resistant to penicillin and tetracycline have been circulating since the 1970s and became widespread by the early 1980s, according to the CDC. Since then, most Neisseria gonorrhoeae have also become resistant to fluoroquinolines, and today the CDC recommends treating gonorrhea with … Continue reading Scientists Discover Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea ‘Superbug’