A superbug strain of gonorrhea that’s resistant to all available antibiotics has been discovered in Japan, posing a potential threat to public health worldwide, infectious disease experts say.
An international team of researchers identified the highly drug-resistant strain of Neisseria gonorrhoeae — the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted infection — through genetic analysis.
Dubbed H041, the strain has extreme resistance to all cephalosporin-class antibiotics, the last remaining drugs still effective in treating gonorrhea.
“This is both an alarming and a predictable discovery,” researcher Dr. Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, said in a statement. “Since antibiotics became the standard treatment for gonorrhea in the 1940s, this bacterium has shown a remarkable capacity to develop resistance mechanisms to all drugs introduced to control it.
A spokesman for the Public Health Agency of Canada said the federal agency is not aware of any cases of H041 strain in this country.
Gonorrhea is one of the most common STIs in the world and can cause infertility, increase HIV transmission, and have profound effects on infants born to infected mothers, including blindness. Left untreated, the disease can be fatal.
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