Scientists find first superbug strain of gonorrhea

The new strain of the sexually transmitted disease -- called H041 -- cannot be killed by any currently recommended treatments for gonorrhea, leaving doctors with no other option than to try medicines so far untested against the disease.

Magnus Unemo of the Swedish Reference Laboratory for Pathogenic Neisseria, who discovered the strain with colleagues from Japan in samples from Kyoto, described it as both "alarming" and "predictable."

"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," he said.

(...) British scientists said last year that there was a real risk of gonorrhea becoming a superbug -- a bacteria that has mutated and become resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics -- after increasing reports of gonorrhea drug resistance emerged in Hong Kong, China, Australia and other parts of Asia.

Experts say the best way to reduce the risk of even greater resistance developing -- beyond the urgent need to develop effective new drugs -- is to treat gonorrhea with combinations of two or more types of antibiotic at the same time.

This technique is used in the treatment of some other diseases like tuberculosis in an attempt to make it more difficult for the bacteria to learn how to conquer the drugs.