Gonorrhea now resistant to common antibiotics

The sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea is now among the "superbugs" resistant to common antibiotics.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending wider use of a different class of drugs to avert a public health crisis.

Gonorrhea, which is believed to infect more than 700,000 people in the United States each year, can leave both men and women infertile and puts people at higher risk of getting the AIDS virus.

Since the early 1990s, a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolones has provided a relatively easy cure. These antibiotics, taken as tablets, include the drug Cipro.

But a growing number of gonorrhea cases is resistant to those drugs, and the CDC for the first time is urging doctors to switch to cephalosporins, a different class of antibiotics, to treat everyone.

"Gonorrhea has now joined the list of other superbugs for which treatment options have become dangerously few," said Dr. Henry Masur, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America.

The highest rates of infection are among sexually active teens, young adults and African-Americans.

-- The Associated Press

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