The United Nations health agency said on Wednesday that drug-resistant strains of gonorrhea have spread to countries through out the world.
The U.N. said millions of patients may run out of treatment options unless doctors are able to catch and treat the dug-resistant strains.
Last year, scientists reported finding a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea in Japan in 2008 that was resistant to antibiotics. Those scientists warned that it could transform gonorrhea into a global threat.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said countries including Australia, France, Norway, Sweden and Britain are reporting cases of drug-resistant gonorrhea.
“Gonorrhoea is becoming a major public health challenge,” Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, from the WHO’s department of reproductive health and research, said in a statement.
Lusti-Narasimhan said over 106 million people are newly infected with the sexually transmitted disease every year.
“The organism is what we term a superbug – it has developed resistance to virtually every class of antibiotics that exists,” she told a briefing in Geneva. “If gonococcal infections become untreatable, the health implications are significant.”
Source: redOrbit (http://s.tt/1dw8P)