Officials with Public Health England identified a gonorrhea infection with a strain completely resistant to the antibiotics typically used to treat the illness.
Here are four things to know.
1. Health officials identified the case in a man who sought medical treatment in England after developing symptoms of gonorrhea a month after having sexual contact with a woman in Southeast Asia. Health workers treated the man with azithromycin and ceftriaxone, but subsequent testing revealed the treatments failed.
"This is the first time a case has displayed such high-level resistance to both of these drugs and to most other commonly used antibiotics," said Gwenda Hughes, PhD, consultant scientist and head of the sexually transmitted infection section at Public Health England.
2. The patient is currently being treated intravenously with the antibiotic ertapenem, which preliminary tests indicate may be working. Health officials will test him for the infection again in April.
3. News of the infection comes on the heels of warnings from public health officials around the world regarding the infection's growing resistance to antibiotics.
"This report is one more confirmation of our greatest fear: drug-resistant gonorrhea spreading around the globe," said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, according to CNN. "Here in the U.S. and around the globe, we have to take drug-resistant gonorrhea seriously in order to invest in finding new cures and preventing infections. Working together, funding must be radically increased to combat this and other life-threatening STDs."
4. Gonorrhea is caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae and is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections in the world, affecting about 820,000 people annually in the U.S. alone, according to the CDC.
To learn more about gonorrhea, click here.
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