Growing resistance to antibiotics forces WHO to review guidelines

• World leaders to meet over challenge
• Borno records fresh polio case

Growing global threat of antibiotic resistance has prompted the World Health Organisation (WHO) to update treatment guidelines for three sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs): gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia.

It said generally, antibiotics were potent for all three STDs which are caused by bacteria.

However, the global health institution noted that the three diseases often go undiagnosed and were becoming increasingly difficult to treat largely due to misuse and overuse of antibiotics.

WHO estimates that every year, 131 million people contract chlamydia; 78 million infected with gonorrhea and 5.6 million for syphilis.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become one of the biggest threats to global health and endangers other major priorities such as human development.

The health agency, in a statement by its Director of Reproductive Health and Research, Dr. Ian Askew, said world leaders would meet at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on the 21st of this month to tackle the challenge.

This makes the fourth time in the history of the United Nations that a health topic is to be discussed at its General Assembly.

Meanwhile, a new polio case has been recorded at an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp in Borno State less than three weeks after two cases were reported in same state.

Officials said yesterday that the fresh detection was a two-year-old boy whose parents reportedly turned down vaccination.

The National Programme Coordinator of Rotary International’s Nigerian National PolioPlus Committee (NNPPC), Boniface Igomu, confirmed the development to The Guardian.

Igomu, who is part of the team coordinating emergency immunisation efforts in the North East, said the child had not received any dose of oral poliovirus because his family declined.