Health officials have long warned that gonorrhea is becoming more and more resistant to all the antibiotic drugs we have to fight it. If public health alarm bells could somehow hit a higher pitch, a study published Thursday from researchers in China would certainly accomplish it.
The study surveyed gonorrhea bacterial isolates—Neisseria gonorrhoeae—from around the country and found that the prevalence of ceftriaxone-resistant isolates nearly tripled between 2017 and 2021. Ceftriaxone-resistant strains made up roughly 8 percent of the nearly 3,000 bacterial isolates collected from gonorrhea infections in 2022. That's up from just under 3 percent in 2017. The study appears in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.