1 week Ago
A key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lab for monitoring antibiotic-resistance in gonorrhea is now, well, gone. The Trump Administration has reportedly laid off all 28 full-time employees and 10 fellows from the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Laboratory Reference and Research Branch. This lab, which has been housed in the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention , has played a key role in the surveillance of sexually transmitted infections, you know the things that have been on the rise over the past decade.
Not having this lab around could make it all the more difficult to track bad-news pathogens that try to make festivals out of your genitals like gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia. This clearly is not super news, unless, of course, you happen to be super gonorrhea. The risk is that a lot of longstanding work is now in limbo and could go by the wayside.
For example, what will become of the Gonococcal Isolate Surveillance Project (GISP) , which had been around for nearly forty years, having been established in 1986? The stated goal of the project is “to monitor trends in antimicrobial susceptibilities of N. gonorrhoeae strains in the United States in order to establish an evidence-based rationale for selection of gonococcal therapies.” It’s basically a surveillance system for gonorrhea that connects different STD clinics and state and local public health authorities across the country with various regional laboratories and the CDC.
This project has involved regularly testing samples of N. gonorrhoeae obtained from STD clinics for their susceptibility to different antibiotics like cefixime, ceftriaxone, azithromycin and ciprofloxacin. This can help guide treatment of such infections.
It can also help prevent overuse of certain antibiotics, which in turn can lead to even more resistant organisms. I have warned in Forbes on multiple occasions about the contiunuing spread of multi-drug resistant gonorrhea and the rise of the s0-called super gonorrhea . Super gonorrhea may sound like a character in the DC or Marvel Universe.
But it’s actually Neisseria gonorrhoeae that’s developed a high level of resistance to the antibiotics normally used to treat the infection: azithromycin and ceftriaxone. And untreated or untreatable gonorrhea can lead to all sorts of complications, including inflammation of the reproductive organs, infertility, bloodstream infections, rashes, sores and various problems that can keep the joints a-rocking such as pain, stiffness and inflammation. But that’s not all folks.
The lab has been serving as the central reference laboratory for STD testing all across the U.S. In other words, it’s been testing the tests used throughout America to make sure that the testing is being done correctly.
Taking out this lab could be like taking out Professor Charles Xavier of the X-men and then messing around with Cerebro. It could have major ripple effects on the Susceptibility testing for ciprofloxacin began Then there are the over 40 field workers in the Disease Intervention and Response Branch that los their jobs. They have been assisting local and state health departments with different STD interventions.
Anyone who has seen the FAX machines at some of these local health departments will realize that many, many such departments do not have the funding, personnel or resources to handle such disease control themselves. All of this is happening despite the fact that the number of STD has been on the rise in recent years. A study from FAIR Health found that the percentage of patients with commercial health insurance patients who had STD diagnoses went up by 4.
8 percent from 2020 to 2023. This included a 23.8 percentage rise among patients 65 years and older and a 16.
2 percent jump among those 55 to 64 years of age. There was a more than fair increase in syphilis (29.4 percent), gonorrhea (16.
8 percent) and HIV/AIDS (14.1 percent) diagnoses. It’s unclear who in the U.
S. Department of Health and Human Services will be responsible for STD prevention and control going forward as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
, the Secretary of the whole thing, has not unveiled a plan or strategy going forward yet. I’ve reached out to Kennedy’s team for further comment and will update the article accordingly. This hasn’t been the only infectious disease capability dismantled by the Trump Administration.
For example, I’ve already written in Forbes about how the HHS Office of Infectious Diseases and HIV/AIDS Policy is being shuttered. It is one thing to cut important public health capabilities knowing that there will be a new organizational structure and resources to compensate. It’s something completely different to cut such capabilities permanently without any plan to add them back.
Even some of these capabilities are eventually re-established, who knows how much damage the pause will cause? Plus, keeping country’s STD experts in the dark all along is a bit like a coach telling the entire football team that there is a game plan for the Super Bowl, but we’re not going to tell anyone it. Now, you may think that sexually transmitted diseases won’t affect you because you are in a supposedly committed relationship or wear like 50 condoms at the same time. But yu can’t always control what your partners do.
Plus, any uncontrolled disease is a drain on society’s resources and will end up costing anyone who pays for health insurance, since higher healthcare use for anyone means higher premiums for everyone. Therefore, there should be incentive for everyone to work collectively to get rid of STDs and give any efforts to do so more than a slow clap, so to speak..
