Medicine may be will soon reach its long-awaited goal: the “morning after pill” to forestall sexually transmitted infections. This can significantly reduce skyrocketing disease rates and large health care costs.
The effectiveness of this pill – and it’s literally a pill, a 200 milligram tablet of the antibiotic doxycycline – has been studied for a decade, and other people have been taking it secretly for years. But the test results published IN The New England Journal of Medicine more likely to tip the pill into clinical practice. In a study conducted in San Francisco and Seattle, participants who took a single dose inside 72 hours of condomless sex were only a 3rd more more likely to develop chlamydia, gonorrhea or syphilis than those that didn’t take the pills.
As with the whole lot in medicine, there are footnotes to the outcomes and the risks to offset the advantages. The study was conducted only amongst gay and bisexual men, in addition to transgender women and non-binary individuals who were assigned the male sex at birth. Within these groups, this was limited to those that had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection (STI) previously 12 months. The study didn’t include cisgender women; in previous studies, the prophylactic antibiotic didn’t work as well for them. The study noted, but didn’t explore in depth, the likelihood that the routine administration of an antibiotic could induce resistance amongst bacteria that cause STDs or other diseases which can be transmitted within the participants’ bodies.
All that said, the outcomes caused real excitement amongst doctors and other people who could be eligible to take so-called doxyPEP (for doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis) – though the health authorities haven’t yet issued formal recommendations on its use.
“I feel it is a real breakthrough,” says Paul Adamson, an infectious disease physician and assistant professor of clinical medicine on the University of California, Los Angeles. “We have an enormous variety of bacterial STDs within the United States. Gay and bisexual men who’ve sex with men are disproportionately burdened with them. We did not have many tools we could use to assist.”
To understand why doxyPEP may be so vital, it is vital to contemplate what happens with STDs. In short: they’re getting stronger. since 2017 According to the CDC, crucial of those diseases reached historic highs: gonorrhea increased by 28 percent and syphilis by 74 percent. And while chlamydia diagnoses haven’t returned to pre-Covid levels, the agency is anxious that this will likely be resulting from pandemic-related disruptions in care, relatively than an actual drop in transmission. All of those infections have profound long-term consequences if left undiagnosed and treated, including making people more prone to HIV infection. Combined, they cost the US healthcare system over $1 billion per 12 months.
Meanwhile, congenital syphilis – which is transmitted from mother to infant after birth, an indication that a pregnant woman never received adequate prenatal care – resulted in 220 stillbirths and infant deaths in 2021, probably the most recent 12 months for which national figures exist. Gonorrhea is becoming proof against the last available antibiotics.
