Welp, It Looks Like We No Longer Have a Cure for Gonorrhea

Evolution is a fickle bitch. On the one hand, it brought us all the way to the point where we have Twitter on our smartphones. Great! I love checking Twitter on my smartphone.

But on the other hand, evolution occurs in all things good and bad (not just humans) and the process of adapting and surviving has now made gonorrhea virtually untreatable. 🙁

Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD), has become resistant to most of the antibiotics that we have used to combat it over the last three decades. That’s right: penicillin and various tetracyclines have all stopped working against the most prevalent strains. This means that today’s gonorrhea patient has very few treatment options left. And with symptoms like burning, swelling of the testicles, vaginal discharge and anal itching, it’s not exactly something that you want to leave untreated.

I concur with that sentiment of the Verge. No one should be discharging on the reg or having their balls swollen to the point of pain. But why has this happened? Well, basic evolution. Gonorrhea strains that are resistant to treatment are the ones that continue to be passed along, until you develop Super Gonorrhea. There’s currently only one treatment for that strain, and that’s possibly going to go by the wayside as well.

 US Center for Disease Control (CDC) thinks that emerging resistant strains will one day take the last remaining first-line treatment option away — a treatment that currently consists of a cephalosporin injection combined with an oral dose of either azithromycin or doxycycline.

And then what? Well, we all have gonorrhea, which means one less excuse to use condoms. At least, that’s how we should construe this, right?

[Sad man via Shutterstock]