Gird Your Loins, Because Australia Has Cooked Up A Super-Super-Gonorrhoea Bug

This is some great news to read over dinner… Jks, it’s revolting! This morning the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Australia’s early-detection system for microbial outbreaks has recorded a “critically drug-resistant” strain of gonorrhoea that’s present in every Australian state.

The strain is highly resistant to last-line antibiotics, making it more than just a superbug — it’s a gonorrhoea super-superbug. Which is… terrifying.

The bug was detected by Australia’s new national antimicrobial detection service, Critical Antimicrobial Resistance Alert (CARAlert), which identifies severely aggressive strains of bacteria against which last-line antibiotics are ineffective.

The service has detected the super-super strain of the common STI, which can be transmitted via oral, genital or rectal contact. This means the STI can be transmitted via unprotected penetrative and oral sex (which is a thing not a lot of people know about gonorrhoea unless they watched Degrassi: The Next Generation).

Professor John Turnidge, a senior medical advisor for the body that overseas CARAlert, told the SMH that the super-superbugs are “the bugs we can’t afford to let get out of hand”. Because they’re critically unaffected by last-line antibiotics, treating and stemming the spread of these dangerous antimicrobial-resistant infections is becoming next to impossible.

Gonorrhoea has been on the rise globally in recent years. A national outbreak of a less-resistant strain of the bug, dubbed simply a “gonorrhoea superbug”, was reported in Australia as early as 2015. That strain, which was particularly aggressive in major cities, was reported as being resistant to most oral forms of penicillin.

Additionally, recent reports from the World Health Organisation have highlighted the “serious situation” of “smarter” and more aggressive strains of the gonorrhoea bug. WHO has called for new drugs to treat the gonorrhoea superbug, which is on the rise and highly resistant to regular oral antibiotic prescriptions. Reportedly the bacteria can “evolve quickly” when specialists develop new antibiotics to treat it.

Gonorrhoea has always been a particularly smart bug, able to adapt to resist treatment, but as cases of infection rise and the bug spreads, it grows stronger and smarter. The risk that the bug will become totally resistant to last-line antibiotics (and therefore impossible to treat) is now critically great.

Strains of the bug that are utterly resistant to antibiotic intervention have been reported in three specific cases in Japan, France and Spain.

In many cases, gonorrhoea presents with few or no symptoms, so detection can’t rely on self-checks for physical symptoms alone. If left untreated the disease can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy and infertility, and can dramatically increase the body’s risk of contracting HIV. The key to preventing further spread of the “pernicious” infection, as with all STIs, is “education and honesty“.

And in Australia we’re lucky: we have early detection systems, access to effective healthcare and treatment, and access to relatively cheap prevention methods, including regular sexual health checks.

Essentially, the best defence is to properly protect yourself during all sexual encounters. Yes, folks, I’m talking condoms and dental dams. Smart and careful sexually active people (particularly those engaging in sex with multiple partners) will use barrier protection when engaging in oral sex, vaginal sex and anal sex.

If you’re sexually active, it’s also a good idea to get tested for sexually transmitted infections regularly, especially if you’re engaging in casual, or “risky” (ie unprotected), sexual behaviour. Ask your GP or a clinician at a sexual health clinic about getting tested.

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Matilda Dixon-Smith is Junkee’s Staff Writer. She tweets at @mdixonsmith.