A new class of antibiotic has been found to work in the lab against the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhoea, which can cause infertility and damage to babies and is fast becoming resistant to all existing drugs. The World Health Organisation has listed gonorrhoea as a high priority infection that poses a great threat to human health, estimating that there about about 78m gonorrhoea infections worldwide each year. In the UK, gonorrhoea is the second most common bacterial STI after chlamydia, with 35,000 cases in England in 2014 alone. The drug was also effective against samples of the drug-resistant bacteria provided to the researchers by the World Health Organisation. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated that 700,000 people around the world die annually from drug resistant infections.

Source: The Guardian August 07, 2017 16:52 UTC