medicine is It’s trying to achieve the long-held goal of the “morning-after pill” to prevent sexually transmitted infections. It has the potential to significantly reduce burgeoning disease incidence and enormous health care costs.
The potency of this pill is literally a pill, a 200 milligram pill of the antibiotic doxycycline.But the research results It was published of New England Journal of Medicine It seems likely that the pill will be applied in clinical practice. The study, conducted in San Francisco and Seattle, found that participants who took one dose within 72 hours of having condomless sex were more likely to contract chlamydia, gonorrhea, or syphilis than those who did not. but he had only one third.
As with all of medicine, the findings have footnotes and risks to balance benefits. Conducted for binary people only. Among these groups, it was restricted to those diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the past year. Cisgender women were not included in this study. In previous studies, prophylactic antibiotics did not do much for them. It was noted that resistance could be caused among any of the other bacteria that have been tested, but were not investigated in detail.
That said, the results have caused real excitement among qualified doctors and people taking what is called doxyPEP (doxycycline for post-exposure prophylaxis). Health authorities such as the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have yet to make formal recommendations for its use.
“I think it’s a real game changer,” says Paul Adamson, an infectious disease physician and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There is an enormous amount of bacterial STIs in the United States. Gay and bisexual men who have sex with men are disproportionately burdened. “
To understand why doxyPEP is so important, it’s important to consider what’s going on with STDs. Simply put, they are skyrocketing. Since 2017, According to the CDCWith gonorrhea up 28 percent and syphilis up 74 percent, chlamydia diagnoses are not fully back to pre-Covid levels. It has not returned, but officials fear it may be due to disruptions in treatment due to the pandemic rather than an actual decline in transmission. have serious long-term consequences, such as making people more susceptible to HIV infection.Collectively, they strain the U.S. healthcare system over $1 billion per year.
On the other hand, congenital syphilis, which is transmitted from mother to infant at birth, is a sign that pregnant women are not receiving adequate prenatal care, causing 220 stillbirths and infant deaths in 2021. Gonorrhea has acquired resistance to the last antibiotic currently available to treat it.
