Why It's Harder to Treat Gonorrhea in 2011

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  A single Suprax (cefixime) pill may cure about 90% of  infections. (Gonorrhea is resistant to Suprax about 10% of the time.) Unfortunately, the drug is sometimes simply not available in the USA due to shortages.
• Rocephin (ceftriaxone) is given when gonorrhea has already spread outside the organs involved in sex acts, or when Suprax doesn't work. It has to be given by injection.
• Trobicin (spectinomycin) is given when there are allergies to the first two medications, but it is not very useful for treating gonorrhea of the throat.
• Erythromycin is given to children or for eye infections caused by gonorrhea, but it doesn't always work and it often causes stomach upset.
• Vibramycin (doxycycline) stops growth of the bacterium without killing it.
• And silver nitrate, the same remedy used in the nineteenth century, is used when all the other options fail, but it's typically only used in a very weak solution to treat babies who may have eye infections. It tends to stain membranes purple, and if it is overused in the eyes, babies may go blind.

Bacteria don't become resistant to silver nitrate, because it works by physically clumping them together (with silver particles). Chinese and Japanese herbal medicine also offer treatments including clay that literally sticks to the bacterium in the urinary tract. Neither of these treatments treats infections that have spread throughout the body.

What You Can Do to Stop Antibiotic Resistance

The single most important thing anyone who has gonorrhea can do to prevent the development of antibiotic resistance is to take absolutely all prescribed antibiotic medication, even if feeling well.

If antibiotic resistance only develops when antibiotics are used, how can this help?

Antibiotics aren't the only way your body fights the disease. A full course of antibiotics kills the maximum number of bacteria. Even if some of the trillions of bacteria that infected you develop antibiotic resistance, reducing their numbers gives your immune system a lot less work to do. Even urination flushes a lot of the bacteria away.

If you don't take all of your prescribed antibiotics, you may have too many bacteria left for your body to get rid of the infection. You may have enough resistant bacteria left to cause an infection that is nearly impossible to treat, while you killed enough of the non-resistant bacteria competing with them for food that they grow more rapidly. The person you protect by taking all the medication you are prescribed isn't just your lover. It may also be you.

What Doctors (and You) Can Do When Antibiotics Don't Work

Unfortunately, there is not a lot doctors can do when antibiotics don't work. The old remedies like kaolin clay (used in Japanese and Chinese formulas) and silver nitrate simply can't reach the bacterium in joints, heart, and central nervous system. Even worse, there are no new drugs in the pipeline to replace the antibiotics now being used.

The best treatment for gonorrhea is prevention. Know your partner, or use condoms if you don't. Using condoms stops about 80% of gonorrhea infections. Get treatment at the very first sign of infection, and make sure your partner or partners do, too.