Medicine -resistant gonorrhea, a form of widespread sexually transmitted infection, is considered an emergency threat to health worldwide. The United States has just lost its ability to locate it.
Among the employees of the Center for Control and Prevention of Disease Center for Tuesday were 77 scientists who, among other things, gathered samples of gonorrhea and other STDs from laboratories at national level, analyzed genetic information on signs of resistance of drugs and prepared the samples for storage.
No other researchers in the organization have the know -how or software to continue this project. The abrupt stop has violated about 1,000 samples of gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted pathogens that had not yet been processed and perhaps tens of more directed to the body.
There are up to 30 freezers full of samples that now do not have guardians, said a senior CDC employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the fear of retaliation.
“We were really really closing in the air, as there was no warning,” the official said. “It was just completely uninvited and chaotic.”
CDC’s work on STDs had taken on a greater urgent need in recent years, as the rates of new infections increased. More than 2.4 million young STDs were diagnosed in 2023, about one million more than 20 years ago.
Nearly 4,000 babies were born with a kin syphilis in 2023. About 280 were mortal or died shortly afterwards.
“Anyone who is free from the lab simply does not understand how important the laboratory is,” said another CDC senior employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
About 600,000 new cases of gonorrhea were diagnosed in the United States in 2023. Bacteria caused by gonorrhea, called Neisseria Gonorrhoeae, Spread through sexual intercourse with genitals, rectum and neck. Left without treatment, it can cause infertility and infertility, infants blindness or even death.
Gonorrhea has become resistant to almost any available antibiotic, leaving a single class that still beats it. The strongest defense combines a shot with Cepftriaxone with azithromycin, but some evidence implies that gonorrhea is evolving to bypass this treatment.
Over more than 25 years, the CDC workshop has been archived about 50,000 samples of gonorrhea – the largest collection in the world – allowing scientists to monitor how the pathogen has changed over time. It is not clear what will happen in the samples.
A new Public Health strategy makes it even more important for the nation to monitor gonorrhea, said Dr. Jenell Stewart, a physician of infectious diseases at Hennepin Healthcare in Minneapolis.
In an attempt to combat the resurgence of syphilis and chlamydia, the CDC recommended last year that homosexuals and bisexual men and transsexual female female take doxycycline, a widely used antibiotic, within 72 hours.
Cities such as San Francisco and Seattle who had earlier supported the practice, called Doxy-Pep, have already seen drastic drops in the rates of these infections.
But researchers are worried that the widespread use of doxycycline can increase resistance to the entire category of antibiotics, called tetracyclines. Some studies show that there may be a reason to worry.
Researchers at Harvard University last month analyzed more than 14,000 genetic sequences created by CDC researchers and found that the percentage of gonorrhea bacteria With resistance to antibiotics it increased to more than 35 % last year, from less than 10 percent in 2020.
The federal scientists who produced this data and made it available to the public have been fired. “Without public health money and infrastructure, I’m not sure who if anyone will take the lens to monitor gonorrhea resistance,” Dr. Stewart said.
“This is a huge loss,” he added.
Dr. Stewart and a colleague spent two years preparing the protocol and an application to study Doxy-Pep women in Cisgender women and watch gonorrhea resistance.
The study was supported by the medical teens network, whose funding was reduced last month.
At least five other grants for the Doxy-PEP study have been terminated, along with a variety of grants to the National Institutes of Health aimed at preventing STDs, including HIV
Any laboratory may try for STDs, but commercial tests cannot determine if gonorrhea responds to available treatments. CDC scientists developed the only such test and provided funding and training to some dozen workshops for sophisticated tests.
Samples were sent to the organization for confirmation. Without scientists in the organization, drug sensitivity tests will probably stop, many experts said.
“We cannot have a national surveillance system without a national laboratory,” said a scientist leading a laboratory funded by the CDC, but did not want to be identified without permission to speak in the media.
CDC scientists have also helped develop alternatives in the test of the outdated nation’s syphilis. It cannot detect an active infection, only if one had ever been infected. The organization has three large contracts for the development of new rapid syphilis tests.
But without expertise and samples by CDC scientists, it is not clear whether this project can continue, said a senior employee with knowledge of the situation.
The fired scientists had about 1,400 years of experience in the field. The official said, “They were well trained people who can’t easily be replaced.”
