The World Health Organization sounded the alarm this week over antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea:
More than 700,000 people in the United States probably get gonorrhea each year. I say "probably" because the Centers for Disease Control doesn't know for sure. It's an estimate, because a lot of those cases go untested, unreported, and untreated. The good news is that, since the 1940s, getting people to get themselves tested has been the hard part. Once you know the gonorrhea is there, antibiotics have made it both easy and cheap to treat. The (more) bad news: That's changing.
Maryn McKenna has details:
One thing that it particularly calls for — as the CDC did in the New England Journal last February — is for physicians to start applying a "test of cure," actually checking microbiologically to see whether a patient who was prescribed an antibiotic for gonorrhea is clear of infection, or harboring a resistant strain.
The problem, of course — you can see this coming — is that once you start bringing patients back and giving them additional and different tests, STD control becomes more costly. (That’s not even to mention the additional, distributed costs of developing new education efforts, surveillance systems or drugs.) In my read, that’s the real news in the WHO’s decision to sound a global alarm: a tacit admission that the era of cheap STD control may be over.
The Dish 