Health warning in Sydney:
resistant STDs
GAY.COM / PLANETOUT.COM
October 26, 2002
Athletes heading to Sydney for the 2002 Gay Games in November should be wary of bringing home an unwelcome, unseen souvenir with them -- in this case, a particularly virulent strain of gonorrhea that is at epidemic proportions in Australia.
Dr. Andrew Grulich told the Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for HIV (news - web sites) Medicine (ASHM) in Sydney this week that gay men engaging in unprotected anal and oral sex were at risk of infection from ciprofloxacin-resistant gonorrhea.
"If you contract gonorrhea while in Sydney, you may want to advise your clinician that you have picked up gonorrhea in an area with high prevalence of resistance to standard antibiotic treatments," Brent Allan, director of community health at the AIDS (news - web sites) Council of New South Wales told aidsmap, an England-based Web site.
Ciprofloxacin, better known as cipro, is the standard antibiotic treatment for gonorrhea in much of the world. In New South Wales, the state where Sydney is located, 11.6 percent of new cases of gonorrhea in the first quarter of this year were resistant to cipro, which is taken orally. To treat the cipro-resistant gonorrhea, health officials in Sydney recommend intramuscular injections of ceftriaxone as first-line therapy. The cipro-resistant strain of the disease has been a problem in Hawaii since 2000, and in May of this year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (news - web sites) issued guidelines in California about the more virulent form of gonorrhea in that state.
The news is of particular risk to people already infected with HIV. Allan said HIV viral load may rise in men who contract gonorrhea, making HIV transmission more likely. In addition, HIV-positive men who get gonorrhea may be putting themselves at risk for a painful, arthritis-like condition associated with the STD.
Besides gonorrhea, rates of syphilis are also high in Sydney.
Despite the increased rates of STDs, Sydney has not seen a spike in rates of HIV infection, even though unsafe sex practices are still high. Grulich told the conference that several factors may be contributing to the steady HIV rates, including larger numbers of gay men being tested for HIV. In addition, Grulich suggested the widespread use of antiretrovirals (which reduce HIV viral load in infected people) may also be related to lower rates of transmission.