Gonorrhea

Seventeen national advocacy organizations have joined to form the National STI Coalition, an effort to advance public health policy goals to combat the rise of sexually transmitted infections.

To mark the transition to a new year, we have compiled a list of the top 10 most-read Infectious Disease News stories of 2019 on Healio.com. Please click the links to read the full stories.

Almost one-quarter of patients who initiate pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV prevention have at least one STI, and nearly three-quarters of those who continue to use it are diagnosed with chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis within 1 year of using it, according to results from a systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Network Open.

The CDC’s announcement that reductions in HIV infections in the United States have stalled in recent years was the top story in infectious diseases last week.

Despite clinical guidelines recommending they be screened biannually for STIs, less than half of men who have sex with men, or MSM, in Baltimore who were taking pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV prevention were tested for syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia upon PrEP initiation during a recent 30-month period, study findings showed.

Evofem Biosciences announced that the vaginal gel Amphora demonstrated a 50% and 78% RR reduction for chlamydia and gonorrhea, respectively, in a phase 2b trial.

In recent years, there has been a trending rise in STDs in the United States, forcing experts to look for alternative prevention strategies. Infectious Disease News asked David C. Harvey, MSW, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, to weigh in on one such strategy — the use of doxycycline as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.

Surveillance data from six U.S. cities showed that only half of HIV-positive men who have sex with men, or MSM, were tested for chlamydia or gonorrhea during visits to HIV clinics in 2016 and 2017, and less than one-third of the screenings involved three-site testing.

WASHINGTON — Entasis Therapeutics announced at the World Anti-Microbial Resistance Congress that it has enrolled the first patient in a global phase 3 trial of oral zoliflodacin for the treatment of uncomplicated gonorrhea.

Despite the trending rise in STDs in the United States, new data published in Emerging Infectious Diseases showed that most physicians do not have injectable antimicrobial drugs available on-site to treat gonorrhea and syphilis.