That’s bad enough, because while we may think of gonorrhea as a minor illness long ago eclipsed in seriousness by HIV/AIDS, it remains one of the most-reported diseases in the country, with more than 600,000 known cases per year. Gonorrhea that goes untreated is personally and socially costly, causing pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility and widespread organ damage. And when resistance is not detected, it is possible for gonorrhea to go, effectively, untreated, because the drugs that are given to cure the infection will not work against the resistant form.But what turns out to be worse — and here is where the unintended consequences come in — is that public health’s attempts to track STDs, as an important public health priority, may have enabled the spread of resistant gonorrhea. That’s because the cheap rapid tests that allow the disease to be diagnosed quickly don’t detect resistance
Read much more via Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: How We Lost Track | Wired Science | Wired.com.
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