Irish, UK and US doctors are carefully monitoring gonorrhea detections amid concern at a new antibiotic resistant strain and its potential public health impact given the rate of increase of the illness in Ireland.

Medical chiefs urged people to take sexual health precautions amid warnings about the dangers of presuming such sexually transmitted infections are easily treated.

One strain of gonorrhea, caused by the bacteria Niesseria Gonorrhoeae, is exceptionally resistant to normal antibiotics and treatment regimes.

“It is a reminder that gonorrhea is becoming increasingly resistant, increasingly hard to treat,” warned Dr Jeffrey Klausner who is a consultant with the US Center for Disease Control (CDC).

“We don’t have any new antibiotics. We haven’t had new antibiotics to treat gonorrhea for years and we really need a different treatment strategy.”

The latest Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) report starkly revealed that case numbers of all five major STDs increased over the past 12 months in Ireland – with all five now being notified at higher levels last year than at 2018, two years before the pandemic struck.

Detections of gonorrhea soared from 2,098 in 2021 to 4,075 last year.