It’s been a warning for some time now that antibiotics will eventually lose the ability to knock out infections as diseases mutate and change in order to become immune and now it’s happening.

Gonorrhea is one of the more common sexually transmitted diseases worldwide and until recently, once detected, it was fairly simple to treat. Now the World Health Organization (WHO) has verified that there are cases of the STD that are resistant to one of the only remaining antibiotics commonly used to treat it. These cases have emerged in Australia, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden and Britain.

There is now immediate action being sought after to cut down on unnecessary use of the antibiotic as well as developing a plan to minimize the risk of the disease being spread to any other people. According to a recent LA Times article in the subject, gonorrhea infects 106 million people throughout the world. Often people do not know they have it, therefore it is easy to spread unknowingly from partner to partner.

In the past, the strains of gonorrhea most commonly experienced by people were those that had more obvious signs of infection. It was said that urinating was extremely painful, as if there were razor blades even. Today, it is more common to not notice any signs or red flags that gonorrhea is present in the body. This is the diseases way of adapting for survival so it is able to infect without being detected.

There are many complications that can develop if the STD is left untreated. These include infertility, problems with pregnancy if conception does occur, stillbirths, higher likelihood of contracting HIV and if a child is born to a a mother with the disease they have a 30-50% change of eye infections or even blindness.

WHO has also noted that of course they can’t know of all cases, especially in underdeveloped countries where there too may be cases of un-treatable gonorrhea.

These new strains of the disease are being deemed “super bugs” as it appears nothing in our arsenal of modern medicine can fight them off. A common treatment is still being used to treat this STD with multiple antibiotics but now plans are underway to come up with additional treatments before these super bugs spin out of control.