When Alexander Fleming received the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering penicillin, he finished his lecture with a warning: "There is the danger," he told the audience, "that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and, by exposing his microbes to non-lethal quantities of the drug, make them resistant." [...]
Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security and development. Common infections, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, are becoming increasingly difficult to treat. [...]
For one, a lot of the antibiotics that are currently used against gonorrhea are used widely for other infections, and N. gonorrheae has the ability to acquire resistance from other bacteria frighteningly quickly, meaning it can rapidly build up resistance. [...]
Every year an estimated 78 million people are infected with gonorrhea, making it the second most frequently reported bacterial STI after chlamydia, according to the WHO. [...]
Men are the target group in the program, Dunne explains, because the yield for isolating N. gonorrheae is very high among men who have urethritis compared with women and those who are asymptomatic. MSM are an important population, she adds, because research shows they are likelier to develop resistance earlier than the general population, for reasons that aren't precisely known. [...]
A major strength of the partnership between the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership and Entasis is that it will be able to limit what infections zoliflodacin is used for. "If you have developed an antibiotic for narrow use, you have to think about how to market the drug. We do not want to drop large quantities of it around the world. But we also want to make sure those who need it get it," he says.
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