Health officials are warning about a “super” strain of gonorrhea that is now sweeping the globe.
Scientists first discovered the antibiotic-resistant version of the sexually transmitted disease in Japan in 2008, and are worried about it spreading after cases cropped up in Australia, France, Norway, Sweden and Britain, the Associated Press reported.
“This organism has basically been developing resistance against every medication we’ve thrown at it,” Dr. Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, a scientist in the World Health Organization’s department of sexually transmitted diseases, told the AP.
“In a couple of years it will have become resistant to every treatment option we have available now,” she said.
Gonorrhea, sometimes known as the clap, is the second most common STD in the world after chlamydia, with some 106 million cases reported worldwide each year and about 700,000 in the U.S.