The World Health Organisation has warned that untreatable gonorrhoea is on the rise. New drugs are urgently needed to treat gonorrhoea, a sexually-transmitted disease threatening to veer out of control as it develops resistance to existing antibiotics, the UN’s health agency said on Friday.
Nearly 80 million people are infected with the disease every year, the WHO said in a statement. Doctors are finding more and more cases of infection untreatable by all known antibiotics.
Gonorrhoea, also called “the clap”, is a disease caused by a bacteria spread through vaginal, oral and anal sex. Untreated, it can cause painful pelvic inflammation in women and infertility in both genders. In extreme cases, the bacteria can spread in the blood to cause life-threatening infections.
