“We’re…seeing what we are calling pretty much an epidemic of syphilis among [MSM] men who have sex with men – that really started in the early – 2000, 2002, but we’ve seen a dramatic increase since 2008,” Dr. Gail Bolan, director of CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, said at a briefing by the National Coalition of STD Directors (NCSD). Bolan also spoke about the increasing threat of gonorrhea: in 2013, the CDC released the report, “Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States;” “We’re very concerned about the threat of untreatable gonorrhea,” Bolan said. “Gonorrhea has been determined by the threat report at CDC to be one of the top three urgent threats in this country. We are down to the last antibiotic – class of antibiotic -- available to treat this organism and this organism has traditionally outsmarted us with every drug we’ve put at it,” Bolan continued.
Bolan additionally said there is a rise in the spread of Shigella, a diarrhea that can be caused by “exposure to feces through sexual contact.” Both the CDC and its European counterpart have reported the spread of Shigella among MSM.*
*In 2013, the CDC declared antibiotic-resistant Shigella an urgent threat in the United States. Resistance to traditional first-line antibiotics like ampicillin and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole is common among Shigella globally, and resistance to some other important antibiotics is increasing…—the two antibiotics most commonly used to treat shigellosis—have been reported recently within the United States and other industrialized countries. About 27,000 Shigella infections in the United States every year are resistant to one or both of these antibiotics. When pathogens are resistant to common antibiotic medications, patients may need to be treated with medications that may be less effective, but more toxic and expensive.