Feb 9, 2023 3 min read

The coronavirus pandemic and, before that, AIDS captured much of the public’s health-concerns attention beyond illnesses and conditions including cancer, heart disease and strokes.

However, another serious medical problem has been lurking in the proverbial shadows – a culprit people generally are reluctant to talk about publicly, but which produced almost 700,000 confirmed cases in the United States in 2021.

That total was a 130% increase since 2009, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quoted in the Jan. 30 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

Also in that article, the serious health nemesis in question – gonorrhea – according to the World Health Organization, recorded at least 82 million new cases globally among people ages 15 to 49 during 2020.

Based on the very troubling statistics that have been reported regarding gonorrhea, it is important for elected leaders in Congress to beef up funding for development of new antibiotics capable of defeating the bacterium Neisseria, gonorrhea’s cause.

Gonorrhea is spread primarily through sexual contact or from a mother to an infant during childbirth.

Recalling scientists’ and researchers’ success at developing COVID-19 vaccines, it is reasonable to believe that, with enough funding, commitment and incentives, significant progress can be achieved on the gonorrhea war front as well.

The lead paragraph of the Journal‘s Jan. 30 article had the power to capture most readers’ attention. It was as follows:

“A highly drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea has been detected in the U.S. for the first time, raising concerns among public-health officials about the scarcity of treatments and a future when gonorrhea could become untreatable.”

Gonorrhea should not be looked upon lightly, and no irresponsible sexual-activity-based humor ever should enter any discussion regarding it. The following paragraph from the Jan. 30 Journal report tells why:

“Gonorrhea can cause long-term complications including pelvic inflammation, infertility and ectopic pregnancies in women, scrotal pain and swelling in men, and blindness in newborns. Untreated gonorrhea increases the risk of getting or transmitting HIV,” the AIDs virus.

Meanwhile, an epidemiologist at University of Illinois-Chicago has said “there’s nothing we’ve thrown at gonorrhea that it hasn’t developed resistance to” – a sobering thought for a world where bacterial and fungal resistance to antibiotics is a global public-health concern.

The WHO estimates multidrug-resistant pathogens – often referred to as “superbugs” – could kill more than 10 million people annually by 2050 if new antibiotics are not developed.

Gonorrhea is the second-most commonly reported bacterial sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., after chlamydia, the CDC says.

Efforts to defeat it should be on a scale consistent with that dubious ranking.