In the hierarchy of sexually transmitted diseases, one tends to privilege the forever diseases, like HPV, HIV and herpes, and not think so much about chlamydia and gonorrhea. They’re unpleasant, to be sure, but nothing a strong course of antibiotics can’t clear up, right?
Maybe not for long. Antibiotic-resistant strains of gonorrhea have been showing up in Japan and Europe over the past three years, according to a terrifying story in this week’s New Yorker. The Neisseria gonorrhoeaeis bacteria is now showing decreased sensitivity to the most powerful antibiotics in 21 countries in Europe.
While drug companies are slow to develop new antibiotics (drugs that cure people quickly are much less lucrative than lifetime prescriptions for cholesterol or ADD), gonorrhea is mutating and spreading quickly owing to its spacious new digs in the back of our throats.
Thanks to increasing ambivalence toward the blow job, which, it is fun to watch The New Yorker explain, “brings the tip of the urethra near the pharynx,” the once genitally located disease is going undetected (or being mistaken for a sore throat) while it gains strength and shape-shifts.
“With hairlike structures that extend from the cell surface, it scavenges DNA that has been cast loose by the death or dissolution of other microbes, and incorporates them into its own genome,” writes Jerome Groopman. “This turns out to be a highly efficient way of acquiring resistance to antibiotics.”
But how’s this for a silver lining?
“Saliva contains enzymes that destroy gonorrhea, so kissing and cunnilingus don’t spread it.”
