STDs cannot always be cured

Sexually transmitted disease (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

STDs cannot always be cured

For many, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, better known as STDs, are just an unpleasant part of life.  The truth is that STDs cannot be always be cured.

It seems that some of the stigma once associated with sexually transmitted diseases has waned and people simply think that as long as it is not Acquired Immunity Syndrome (AIDS) that they are safe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The bad news is that researchers recently revealed that there is a common strain of a STD that is resistant to common antibiotic treatment. That means that at the moment STDs cannot always be cured.

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The Center for Disease Control (CDC) is quite concerned about this because their findings indicate that the bacteria has become immune to the antibiotics that treat gonorrhea, which is the second most common STD in North America.

In the past, Gonorrhea has been quite curable.

If it is unable to be cured, there are serious health consequences for those that are infected, such as infertility, and it can increase the risk of infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

The good news is that three new antibiotic regimens have been identified to treat gonorrhea

The CDC says only one antibiotic may now safely be used on a regular basis, and it has to be injected. That can make treatment difficult, because many doctors do not regularly stock the medication to be injected, so patients would have to come back for treatment. And many patients prefer pills to shots.

The other two options are new antibiotic regimens to treat gonorrhea that use existing drugs and preliminary trials conducted appear to be promising.

Still, Gail Bolan, director of the division of STD Prevention at the CDC says the new treatments are, “An encouraging development in a discouraging field”.

The problem is that deadly bacteria are outwitting medicines, which in turn creates new drug-resistant forms of disease that few, if any, medicines can treat so it is a never ending battle therefore, since STDs cannot always be cured, the safest avenue to take is prevention.

According to the CDC, prevention measures you can take include using latex condoms. Used consistently and correctly, latex condoms can reduce the risk of getting or giving gonorrhea.

The most surefire way to avoid gonorrhea is to not have sex obviously, or to be in a long-term, mutually monogamous relationship with a partner who has been tested and is known to be uninfected.

Related articles

• Hoping To Avert Drug-Resistant STDs, Federal Researchers Develop New Treatments For Gonorrhea
• Drug-resistant gonorrhea cured in new drug trial
• Study: United Kingdom Staving Off Untreatable Gonorrhea, For Now
• Two antibiotic combinations show success in treating gonorrhea in clinical trials

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