Men are four times more likely to get treatment resistant gonorrhea than women are, new research reveals.
The sexually transmitted infection behaves very differently in men and women, typically causing clear, visible symptoms in men and none in women.
Once a highly-curable disease, gonorrhea is now resistant to ‘nearly every drug used for treatment,’ according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now researchers at Tufts University have found that men are at far greater risks of catching one of these untreatable variations of gonorrhea.
Antibiotic resistant strains of the sexually transmitted gonnorrhea bacteria are four times more common in men than in women, new research shows
Nicknamed ‘the clap,’ gonorrhea is one of the most common sexually-transmitted diseases in the world.
Every year, there area some 350,000 cases of gonorrhea in the US.
Gonorrhea is a common bacterial infection that can be passed from person to person through vaginal, oral or anal sex.
It infects the urethra, resulting in white, yellow or green discharge for men. Women typically don’t develop symptoms and, even if they do, they are so mild that gonorrhea is often mistaken for a bladder infection.
Women’s subtle symptoms are particularly worrisome for a disease that may soon be incurable, but is still very much transmissible.
It is not entirely clear why the disease presents so differently in men and women, though the study authors suspect that the other microbes in the vagina may actually be somewhat protective against the bacterial infection.
The Tufts University researchers conducted their study in China, which provided them a unique population for them to examine, given that men are symptomatic and women are asymptomatic.
‘Most of the people we were studying were married men and they get the disease from their mistress or a sex worker and come into the clinic with it and that’s why we recruit their wives,’ who have almost certainly gotten the disease from their husbands, explained senior study author Dr Caroline Genco.
Antibiotic resistant gonorrhea is beginning to make its way West already.
Earlier this year, an English man got one of the first strains of gonorrhea to be resistant to multiple antibiotics after visiting South East Asia.
Experts told Daily Mail Online that prostitution in the region is fueling the spread of the STI.
At first, the man’s gonorrhea was deemed untreatable, the man’s infection was eventually cured in April.
When they examined the forms of the disease that were infecting Chinese men and women, they found that while the bacteria’s underlying genetics were similar, this DNA was quite different in men and women.
The strains were mostly the same, but men had more expression of the bacteria itself, and the strains they carried were more likely to be antibiotic-resistant.
‘The strains causing the disease that encode resistance are very similar in men and women, but they much higher levels in men,’ said study author Dr Genco.
The higher levels of expression mean that it may take more powerful doses of antibiotics to wipe out the infection in men.
In China, antibiotics don’t require a prescription. Half of the men the Tufts researchers studied had already taken an antibiotic for the infection, but hadn’t cleared it.
‘It implies that the over the counter antibiotics are really making the problem worse,’ says Dr Genco.
‘And in the US, we’re seeing an increase in antibiotic-resistant strains of gonorrhea.’
Antibiotic resistant super-gonorrhea is already extremely prevalent in China, but ‘it’s coming,’ says Dr Genco.
‘Diseases like this tend to make their way from the Western Pacific area to the US. But maybe if we have a better understanding of how the disease is different in men and women’ – as her study reveals – ‘we can treat it better.’