What You Need To Know About The New-Super-Gonorrhea

Every year, the US Centers for Disease Control estimate, about 700,000 people in the United States alone are infected with gonorrhea, only about half of them going to see a doctor for treatment. Rates of infection in the various states of the United States vary drastically, from just 7 per 100,000 in Idaho and 8 per 100,000 in Vermont to 246 persons per 100,000 in Mississippi and 433 per 100,000 in Washington, D.C.  

Who Is Mostly Likely to Get Gonorrhea?

Women are about 20% more likely to become infected with gonorrhea than men, although men who have sex with men are the most likely to become infected with strains of the disease that cannot be treated with antibiotics. Men are far more likely to show their symptoms of the disease (painful urination, discharge, and a kind of muscle tension known as tenesmus) than women are to show their symptoms of the disease (infrequent urination, itching, painful urination, pelvic pain, and sometimes serious complications in pregnancy).

Gonorrhea can affect the genital tracts of both sexes, the rectum, the throat, and the eyes. Fellatio is more likely to cause infection than cunnilingus. Certain racial groups tend to have more infections than others, although there is nothing about the infectious microorganism itself that prefers one race over another. Gonorrhea in the eye can rapidly result in loss of the eye and blindness. In men, gonorrhea can result in sterility. In women, in rare instances, gonorrhea can result in death.

Treating Gonorrhea Is More Difficult Than It Used to Be

Some doctors commenting on modern gonorrhea treatment say that it used to be that "all you needed to do was to wave a vial of penicillin at the patient" and gonorrhea was easily cured. As recently as 2001, about 99.4% of cases of gonorrhea in the United States could be resolved with a single dose of penicillin. In 2011, however, the US Centers for Disease Control reported that:

• 11.8% of cases could no longer be treated with penicillin;
• 13.3% of cases could no longer be treated with antibiotics of a class known as the fluoroquinolones (including drugs like Cipro);
• 22.7% of cases could no longer be treated with tetracycline.

What this means that the days of discovering you have gonorrhea, or having been told your sex partner has gonorrhea, and getting it treated with a pill or a shot are over. Nowadays, the standard of care is a shot of an antibiotic called ceftriaxone plus either a shot or a pill of an antibiotic called azithromycin (which isn't cheap) or seven days of treatment with an antibiotic called doxycycline twice a day for seven days. It can be necessary to re-test for gonorrhea even after taking antibiotics for a full week.

There isn't any alternative to antibiotics if you want to make sure you get gonorrhea out of your life. But there are ways you can avoid getting the infection in the first place.

Ten Things Sexually Active People Need to Know about Avoiding Gonorrhea

If you are sexually active, and especially if you are sexually active with multiple partners or your partner has sex with multiple partners, here are ten things you need to know about how to avoiding contracting gonorrhea.

• Any kind of sex can transmit gonorrhea. It does not have to be penile-vaginal sex.

• People who have had gonorrhea before tend to think they won't get it again. Unfortunately, the immune system doesn't build up any kind of resistance to the disease. Just because you have had it once doesn't mean you can't have it again.

• While you are being treated for gonorrhea, you can spread the disease. It is important to abstain from sex with another person until you have been told your infection has been resolved, and they have been treated, too.

• Using condoms reduces your risk of getting gonorrhea from an infected partner by about 25%. You are only slightly less likely to get the disease if you use condoms (although there are other reasons you may choose to use barrier contraception).

• Symptoms of gonorrhea can show up where you wouldn't expect them. If gonorrhea begins to spread from the sex organs, for example, one of the places it is especially likely to cause inflammation is the knee joint. Itching and burning "down there" followed by joint pain is a sign a visit to the doctor is urgent.

• In women, lower back pain is an early sign of a complication of gonorrhea (or chlamydia) known as pelvic inflammatory disease, or PID. Again, medical care is urgent to prevent serious complications.

• When men experience swelling of the testicles after infection with gonorrhea, it is usually in just one testicle, and accompanied by discharge from the tip of the penis.

• Any place there is sexual contact can be infected with gonorrhea, but some kinds of sexual activity are less likely to result in symptoms. In a study of pornographic film actors, 28% tested positive for gonorrhea and/or chlamydia. However, 91% of actors who had gonorrhea in the throat had not noticed their symptoms and 95% of actors who had rectal gonorrhea had not noticed their symptoms. The disease is most likely to be spread by unprotected sex with people who do not even know they have it.

• Changes in the pH of the vagina make women more susceptible to infection when they are having their periods and when they are pregnant. Women infected with gonorrhea at these times are more likely to have a disseminated infection, one that travels through their bloodstreams.

• In the United States, gonorrhea is more common than syphilis, in most racial groups. In Asia and Africa, syphilis is more common than gonorrhea. Syphilis does not cause painful symptoms at first, although gonorrhea usually does.