Alabama has the third highest rate of newly reported cases of gonorrhea in the United States (9,132 new cases) according to a 2011 analysis conducted by the Centers for Disease Control.
Vanessa G. Allen, M.D., M.P.H., of Public Health Ontario, Toronto, Canada, and colleagues are the first to conform a 6.77 percent rate of antibiotic resistant gonorrhea in a preliminary study published in the Jan. 9, 2013, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“The study group consisted of N. gonorrhoeae culture-positive individuals identified between May 2010 and April 2011 and treated at a sexual health clinic in Toronto with cefixime as recommended by Public Health Agency of Canada guidelines. The primary outcome measure for the study was cefixime treatment failure, defined as the repeat isolation of N. gonorrhoeae at the test-of-cure visit identical to the pretreatment isolate by molecular typing and explicit denial of re-exposure.”
“There were 291 N. gonorrhoeae culture-positive individuals identified. Of 133 who returned for test of cure, 13 were culture positive; 9 patients were determined to have experienced cefixime treatment failure, with an overall rate of clinical treatment failure of 6.77 percent. The rate of clinical failure associated with a cefixime MIC of 0.12 μg/mL or greater was 25 percent compared with 1.90 percent of infections with cefixime MICs less than 0.12 μg/mL.”
Considering the explosive growth of HIV/AIDS since the first discovery of the disease in 1981, Alabama is a definite target for an increase in treatment resistant gonorrhea.
The single most prevalent cause of this inevitable disaster is the “abstinence only” stance of legislators and educators in Alabama.
The cost of a condom compared to the cost of Medicaid or Medicare treatment of a person with antibiotic resistant gonorrhea should be impetus enough for the immediate delivery of condoms to every person in Alabama over the age of 14. This preventative model will never happen as long as legislators persist in the failed “abstinence only” theory.
Legislation has been proposed in Alabama to would eliminate the Legislature's role in setting sex-education standards in the state, allowing the Alabama Department of Education to establish its own program, says the bill's sponsor, Representative Patricia Todd, Democrat (Birmingham).
The research was reviewed at the Eureka Alert website the date of publication.
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